blogging for that solitary individual

Blogging for "That Solitary Individual"

November 9, 2008

I've read the reports about the astronomical number of blogs out there.. but anyone browsing for interesting blogs will find that a large number are defunct.. or hardly posting. I am even a contributor to this problem since the central assignment for my Intro to Religious Studies course is to keep a blog. Most—if not all—of those blogs end promptly with the term. Nicholas Carr comments on some figures published by Technorati:

...at least 94 percent of [blogs] have gone dormant, the company reports in its most recent "state of the blogosphere" study. Only 7.4 million blogs had any postings in the last 120 days, and only 1.5 million had any postings in the last seven days. Now, as longtime blogger Tim Bray notes, 7.4 million and 1.5 million are still sizable numbers, but they're a whole lot lower than we've been led to believe. "I find those numbers shockingly low," writes Bray; "clearly, blogging isn’t as widespread as we thought."

That doesn't surprise me.. and to my way of thinking the number of individual bloggers will slowly converge on the number of journalers in the general population. One reason I've never found blogging onerous is that I've had periods where I wrote and wrote in journals (a closet stacked to my waist with old journals). Those who blog as a form of journalism will end up joining mainstream sites.. and get worked into the MSM. But it is the class of bloggers who write for themselves that I am most interested in.

"Writing for themselves" is an odd phrase in relation to blogging.. I realize. Technorati and its method of quantifying authority by number of links distorts what is valuable about individual blogs. The method gives priority to comments on popular topics and trends, as those are what will be searched for and linked to.

Soren Kierkegaard serves as a counter example of how writing can be valued and authority determined. Kierkegaard was obviously not a blogger since he died in 1855, but he was a compulsive writer and self-publisher. He dedicated Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing to "That Solitary Individual." He goes on to explain what he means:

...that solitary "individual" whom with joy and gratitude I call my reader; that solitary "individual" who reads willingly and slowly, who reads over and over again, and who reads aloud—for his own sake. If [this book] finds him, then in the distance of the separation the understanding is perfect. [27]

Needless to say there are not too many readers who qualify. The Internet is not really geared to produce such readers, but neither was the book publishing industry in Kierkegaard's time! Instead he laid down a personal standard by which his success could be measured.. and that was the connection that his book would make with a careful and ready reader. Other readers he could brush off.

This is not to say that blogging should be in hope of an audience far in the future (Kierkegaard is a truly unusual example of that feat), but it could be done with more of an emphasis on connecting with low numbers of people whose thoughts are congenial to one's own. The idea would be to develop blogging circles and not to worry about the quantification methods of sites like Technorati. The inevitable result of the Technorati approach is professionalization, since there's no way a hundred thousand daily hits will not be monetized. But think about it: a hundred thousand daily hits means writing about something that draws one hundred thousad people. Not my idea of fun! For bloggers who are interested in independent thoughts and development, that does not even count as a temptation.