The Blog as Masturbation

What do people want?

That's a question I've been thinking about lately, for a variety of reasons. Partially because I'm not gainfully employed in a full-time career, partially because I've always felt myself to be capable of creating praise-worthy content, and partially because I watched The Social Network again.

But no, this won't turn into another piece on that movie.

Hit the jump for more.


I write this blog, and I think I write things worth reading. But that, however, is distinctly not for the audience. Like most blog writing, it's for the writer. It's a way of demonstrating my talents, exposing the wide range of topics I'm capable of exploring to a wider audience. It's a line on a resume, sample pieces to send off to potential employers.

It's certainly not what people want.

People don't want to read, and they really don't want to read other people's opinions. They have their own-- thankyouverymuch-- and the last thing they want to expose themselves to is another often pretentious, occasionally self-righteous and ridiculously egotistic twenty-something thinking that he knows everything about, um, everything.

Audience is important when considering art. When creating a painting, the painter must look at it with the eye of someone who is unaware of the advanced techniques needed to create it. When writing a book, one must not let a mastery of language distract from the plot. When filming a movie, one must not let camera angles and editing tricks dominate at the sacrifice of accessibility.

But in the blog world, accessibility is often a dirty word. I've written about this before, but in a very real way writing a blog is like preaching to the converted. And often it's like preaching to yourself. Without feedback, a blog posts exists in a vacuum. When a blog post exists in a vacuum, its point becomes meaningless to all but its creator.

No joke, writing a blog post is a lot like masturbating.

When I was posting my live-tweets of the TV show Chuck on this blog, if you were a regular follower (are there regular followers? I have no idea) you might have noticed that my tone for those tweets was significantly different than the tone for most of my posts on the blog. That's because I knew the audience for those tweets, and they knew me, in a way. My persona in those tweets is silly and snarky, fun and (hopefully) funny.

It's not a side that the blog sees a lot, because I think I take the blog more seriously than I take my "critiques" of Chuck. On here, I'm far more earnest. And I think some of that is because this blog seems to exist in a vacuum. Because I lack the fear of reprisal, I'm not afraid of being too vindictive or too corny, too pretentious or too political.

I'm interested in what people want (I'm interested in sex, so to say). But, for now, with the eyes of the world turned away, I don't really mind saying that I kind of like masturbation.