An Introduction, or Why Write?
Hello, and welcome to my (new) blog :)
An Introduction
Writing is my hobby. I feel that I haven't yet graduated to the point where I can call it a passion even though I have been engaged semi-consistently in the act of writing for at least past 15 years, and even though I have deigned to call it a passion more times than not in those years. Over the years I have come to realize the grandeur of my ambitions, the limited scope of my actions, and the chasm that lies between the two. Thus, I feel that a little humility should serve me well in order to free my actions from the weight of great expectations I have often put on them.
I used to write blogs. In the flourishing era of Web 2.0 before the corporations took over the internet, the blogosphere was an exciting place to be. I started with Blogger, moved over to Wordpress, maintained the main blog for about 5 years. I experimented with new and upcoming platforms like Posterous (only a few would remember it), Tumblr. With time, the internet changed, and I changed as well. Writing a blog was the cool way to share your ideas with the world in those days, and it was teeming with interesting people and interactions among them. Over time, blogs slowly became irrelevant, monetization and algorithmic social media took over, and building a personal brand became the go-to method to exist (individually) on the internet. Blogs too became all about that; launchpads for authors, lifestyle and cultural commentators, professionals, content creators, and influencers. It wasn't what i was trying to do with my blog, and I simply ran out of things to say. So the blog slowly came to a halt, and was left dormant for many years before I decided to delete it.
The urge to write something and share it with the internet did remain though.
Why blog?
In the last few years, my interest in and appreciation for new minimalist blogging platforms that have come up recently has increased. I made an account on Bear Blog some time back, but could not get myself to start writing until now. The decision to start this blog came after a long period of debating with myself and under the shadow of a lot of doubts and questions. The questions being:
- Why write?
- Do you even have anything interesting to say?
- Who writes blogs these days? Do they even matter?
- What do you want to achieve with this blog?
- Why not Substack or Medium to grow your audience?
Why write? There are a lot of answers to this question, but their roads always lead to an end which is something other than writing. Audience, fame, acclaim, renown, money. And while they are worthwhile goals to vie for, the foundational reason I want to base my writing upon is that writing can be an end in itself. Writing is self-expression. Writing is a tool for thought. It is a conscious struggle with oneself to structure one's thoughts, to put a shape to the amorphous mess of one's mind, and to extract sense and meaning out of it for oneself and to the outside world. Even if there is no one else to see your writing (and that has been the case for most of mine), it matters. And I don't mean any of it in the value-neutral, ultra-positive sense that some content-creators and writing enthusiasts have made it out to be. Not any and all writing is good. It can be good. The struggle to reach there is the inherent value of the act of writing. In that context, I write to share my thoughts. But even if it reaches nobody, if nobody reads it, the blogs serve as accounts of my writing journey.
What is this blog about?
Do I have anything interesting to say? That remains to be seen. I intend to write about media and culture that I consume, stuff that interests me, and stuff I have thoughts about. That includes books first and foremost, but may extend to global internet culture, films, music, and related stuff.
Blogs don't matter much these days, but there's a certain charm to this ejection of blog-writing from the accelerating mainstream of internet. Blogs, written ones specifically, aren't best-suited to any of the things that people usually want to do on the internet these days: building a personal brand, scaling their reach and audience, connecting with people, building a business. They aren't optimized, productive, in the hustle-culture sense of those words. Probably that makes them a good place to explore and express oneself without the internet pushing one into certain directions, ways, and modes of content creation. It is for the same reason I did not choose Substack or Medium. I am not writing with any specific goals of creating, scaling, and monetizing a large audience. I want my focus to remain on my writing. My philosophy of writing/creation on the internet aligns very closely with Herman's philosophy which has informed the form and architecture of Bear Blog, and that has been the primary reason I decided on choosing this platform to restart blogging.
Most of my writing has been addressed to myself. While this is not a bad thing per se, there is a certain narrowing of field of vision which takes place when the only audience is oneself. It informs not just the content; the form of writing acquires a rambling looseness akin to a wandering mind talking to oneself. This post is a salient example of the same. I want to learn how to write outside of myself, addressing an external audience, even if an imaginary one.
So, any and each one of you possibly reading this, welcome to the blog! I hope you enjoy reading my posts and find something of value in here for yourself.