There are exceptions, okay. But very few bloggers can actually write. Bloggers pander to a crowd trying to satisfy the hive mind. Blogging is entertainment. Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially aggrandizing self-promotion, but not writing.
Crowdsourcing is a bloggers’ anthem. I remember my first blog. I deleted it. The posts didn’t get commented on and weren’t passed around. That wasn’t the point. But for bloggers, that is their mission; to create 500-word packages, bold-faced and headlined, read and digested in two minutes or less, bursting with lackadaisical opinion and junk epithets.
“Blogging is not writing,” the author of You Are Not a Gadget Jaron Lanier agrees. “It’s easy to be loved as a blogger. All you have to do is play to the crowd. Or flame the crowd to get attention. Nothing is wrong with either of those activities. What I think of as real writing, however, writing meant to last, is something else. It involves articulating a perspective that is not just reactive to yesterday’s moves in a conversation.”
Blogging is in its essence, not about originality, but about the aggregation, recycling and digesting of ideas. It is the darling of the open culture ideology of the web, where mediocre collaborations have produced a destructive new social contract, reports the New York Times.
“The basic idea of this contract,” Lanier argues, “is that authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.”
We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight.
Bloggers are not writers, nor are they press, or superior to old media. Where disintermediation in the media shines, where a cadre of reporters has eliminated the need for a specific background (say, a degree in journalism or the need to pay dues at the right newspapers), is not evidence of bloggers taking over the world, but rather that the term blogger is now so broad that its definition no longer suits the myriad stacks of people and posts underneath.
Take a journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a reporter for the Huffington Post, a novelist, a Mashable blogger and a Gen Yer typing about their quarter-life crisis. They are not the same, nor equal, and certainly not held to the same standards or expectations. They are, despite the fact that we’d like to give little credence to the notion, entirely different.
“It’s as if culture froze just before it became digitally open, and all we can do now is mine the past like salvagers picking over a garbage dump,” Lanier writes. “Creative people — the new peasants — come to resemble animals converging on shrinking oases of old media in a depleted desert.”
Blogging is entertainment. Maybe it didn’t use to be. Maybe when bloggers were first getting started, it was about thought and connection. But increasingly, it bows to the “appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise.”
Writing is something more. And it is in the reading of such writing that enduring ideas, observations and philosophies satiate what we spend hours a day trying to glean from skimming any number of blog posts.
There is nothing wrong with blogging. But let’s give credit where it’s due – to the true writers, journalists, novelists, reporters, columnists, and others who inspire us to boil their ideas down in an effort to hold onto them just a little longer.
107 replies on “Bloggers Are Not Writers”
[…] see that Rebecca Thorman couldn’t agree with me on that when she said: bloggers are not writers … Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially […]
[…] see that Rebecca Thorman couldn’t agree with me on that when she said: bloggers are not writers … Many bloggers are good at marketing, building community, relationships, and especially […]
Fantastic post, redeeming for those of us holding on tooth and nail to our classic newsroom training and journalistic integrity. Thank you.
I could not agree more to this article. I am a blogger myself and I don’t think that I am a good writer too but I have developed readership over the years.
I came across today an article titled ‘Bloggers are Not Writers’. Wow, you should have seen all the comments. People actually fussing over who is a writer or a blogger and why. The real question or topic should not be who is a writer and why. It should be what can we do to support those who want to be a writer and how to support those who actually are writers and bloggers. etc. Writers supporting other writers in a writing community and beyond.
One person actually believes a writer is someone who gets paid! What next ? If you aren’t a millionaire writer then you aren’t all that good? Silly argument/logic. I guess that dispels the myth of the starving artist too. Huh? One person is proud not to be a writer! That’s akin to an ignorant person being proud they are dumb! But, if that is where they are, ok. Not my cup of tea, but I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid either.
Back to my original statement. It’s not about who is or is not a writer or a blogger. No one has the all-knowing power of knowing that. Why? Because writing is subjective. Instead of kicking each other and criticizing someone for trying to write or blog for whatever the reason… we should be talking about how to enhance our writing. How to support each other. How to teach those who aspire to write. How to help those who are struggling. How to support the experienced writer. How to create an effective and supportive community.
I don’t care if you are a writer or a blogger or both. What I care about is if you want to better our craft no matter which tool you use or genre or method of writing or blogging. If you believe you are a writer, then who am I to try to destroy that dream or image of who you are as a person? Every ‘great’ writer has experienced times when their audience did not understand the writing or did not have the skills to interpret that writing. Every ‘great’ writer has been filled with self-doubts about their abilities and their work. Every ‘great’ writer experienced negative reactions, negative criticism, and was thought of as a terrible writer or not even a writer by someone.
It’s not about what other people think about our work or ourselves. There will ALWAYS be judges and critics. Especially ones who don’t even write or understand the field in the first place. It’s about our own dreams and values. Did we satisfy our own criteria. Did we do our best and strained to do even better? Did we learn as much as possible in order to do our best? Did we support others in THEIR dreams? Do we care about the advancement of writing, personally and collectively for the advancement of human consciousness? If you are serious…then you are who you say you are. I think and write and therefore I am a writer….AND a philosopher, a teacher, and a blogger, and whatever else I aspire and think to be and work to be. I have the credentials to back it all up. And even if I didn’t, who are you to take that away from me or anyone else? Who are you to even question who I am or not? Isn’t it enough to be who YOU are? Everyone… every writer, blogger, etc., had to start somewhere… at the bottom. And work their way up from there. NO writer has ever been perfect.
If you do not like my work, go find something or someone you do like and respect. I don’t write for everyone. No one does. I don’t use all my tools all the time. No one does. I refuse to bow to anyone’s opinion of who I am. I alone get to do that for me. I refuse to be handcuffed to anyone’s rules about writing. Any experienced writer will tell you there are none…even though there are as many professed rules that abound as the stars.
Being a writer takes courage, whether as a blog writer, a novelist writer, a poet writer, a song writer, etc. It’s hard work. Its daunting and exhilarating, often all at once. For every rule created, some brave writer soon broke them. There are as many kinds of writers as there are humans who write. Writing is not about rules, definitions, boundaries, and limitations. Writing is about soul. Writing is about freedom. Writing is about the experience of being human. And not. Writing is as limitless as the imagination. So write.
Forget the other foolishness. This argument about you aren’t a writer if you do this or that…is the same kind of dumb argument people in the past, and sadly for some in the present…had about whether black people were humans or equals. Or, if women were equal or second-class citizens with no rights. Or gays. Or, if you are poor then you must be lazy and it’s all your fault. Etc. We all came to this planet the same way. We all will leave it the same way, until future technology changes that.
Decide for yourself who you are and what you want to do. I will not limit myself to someone else’s interpretation of me. I AM a writer and I AM a blogger. Something you can not ever take away from me. Don’t allow anyone to do that to you either.
If you ever feel put down from your own self-doubt or anyone else. Write to me. I will support you in your endeavors. That is a promise to you and myself. I want to pay it forward and you can count on that. See for yourself with my blog, http://afterwriterdreams.com, whether I have met that commitment. I guarantee you I have as a writer and a blogger, in my own style and voice, supported and welcomed all writers here.
Sincerely,
Margaret Nystrom, M.A.T., Q.P.
Well said! And blogs are not books. As an author who has published 17 books traditionally, I am always cautioning my writing students to do the hard work of real writing. Write first, blog later—while on book tour.
[…] read an article recently titled “Bloggers are Not Writers.” This is an old article, but it struck a nerve with me. Obviously, some of what she is […]