Blogthinking
blog
I accidentally posted yesterday’s entry prematurely, revealing in the process that these blog entries are often written in advance. At first I did this when we had people to stay or went away for the weekend to ensure continuity and achieve my goal of posting once per day for an entire year, but gradually I have come to do it all the time, as a way of giving myself a break and preventing the condition that I know as blogthinking.
Blogthinking is where you can’t experience any event or activity without hearing it as a blog post. It can happen anywhere at anytime. You’ll be investigating a possible leak under your sink and then you’ll hear your writing voice saying “I was doing plumbing this weekend and started thinking about the hydraulic theory of the mind.” You’ll be cleaning the windows, listening to an Open Court podcast about the prisoner’s dilemma in Quentin Tarantino films, when you start blogthinking about “how it’s interesting how we procrastinate about these tasks of for weeks, even though they only take about twenty minutes.” It’s not so much the thought that is any different to a normal thought, rather it is the expectation of an audience that makes it such a terrible indulgence.
A few years ago I wrote a satirical story about reality TV in which individuals could be recorded constantly by a personal POV camera that could be mixed with other POVs and CCTV in order to create a film of your own life. I imagined that people would become obsessed about making their own lives dramatic and interesting, so that they could watch it when they got home. At the time, I assumed that such a life would be sterile and mechanical, lacking authenticity. Now I realise that it is essentially the same as blogthinking, except you have to write it up rather than just watch it on TV.
So what is the solution? Stop blogging? Blog about very specific things rather than all of human life? Write a private diary? I don’t know but if I start hearing that voice again I am going to set the hounds on it.