Dearest Internet,
According to the stats, the readership of this site is very small, and not growing. Relatedly, an online pal - the dude who runs the Debriefing blog (about Vic Chesnutt, full of great insights into tracks and alternate versions and histories) - this week published a plea for his readers to let him know if what he was doing was worth anything. Of course I wrote him saying yes, I dig it - but also that I know the feeling.
I've been writing online regularly for, believe it or not, nearly 14 years. When I started I felt Free, with a capital F: above it all, powerful, unlimited. (It bears mentioning that the possibility then to hand-code a site in notebook and see the results become live was part of the thrill, the same way desktop publishing was a thrill, the same way photocopying a zine was a thrill. This has changed somewhat, with the changes to the internet - CSS, PHP, and walled gardens like Facebook and Tumblr and etc.)
But the thrill changed fairly rapidly to a deadened feeling that is the flip-side of Freedom: solitude and anonymity. It's changed year by year - from being thrilled by growing stats to the realization that visitors are mostly coming to borrow images (which I borrowed in turn) for their own blogs, or to grab the free MP3, regardless of the reflections on the song; from feeling content to just write/think aloud to feeling like a single voice in an enormous crowd, essentially wasting effort or time. The two or three times something I've done/written has gotten more than, say, 20 eyeballs have always dissipated immediately, as attention on the internet does. But I've still continued, for various reasons.
An aside: I had a thought at a less-than-enjoyable Prince show in the Enormodome here in Toronto, as I watched a huge percentage of the crowd being more riveted by the image of the show on their phone's screen. What, I wondered, is the use? Who the fuck would go on youtube to watch a Prince song on a shaky video with terrible sound and chatter in the background? What is the recording FOR?
It suddenly reminded me - the recording from ten thousand angles - of motion capture tech. I know nothing more than what they reveal in the Making of (the Matrix, Star Wars, LOTR, whatever) - that cameras from many angles allow for greater creativity with the image. It occurred to me that, maybe, if enough people were recording the show, and if the data were combined in some great engine in the future, the event might be recreatable - in some later-gen Second Life or something. A virtual representation of the whole thing might be possible someday - and that maybe that's what we're unwittingly practicing for. Someday - when we're all connected, all the time, and the internet is a plane we can exist on - the experience might be sharable.
Somehow that comforted me.
I don't like feeling like part of a crowd - I hate the feeling, in fact. So I don't care to record things that are being recorded by all of the people around me, or share what's already being shared. But I do value my fringe-y opinions, and my outsider perspective, and if the internet is going to be full of the world, I do want my point of view represented. By me. My contribution to the internet is comparable to my contribution to society: infinitely small but unique.
I haven't found the internet to provide much society to me. Most of the tips I get about where to spend my attention point right back into the internet. I haven't found any actual comics community, despite years of looking (I find message boards, but people are either talking about mainstream things or yelling into the winds of obscurity with their unique POVs, nobody responding to each other). My options for music are greater, and I like that - but it's not a discussion anymore than going to Rotate This (ie. sometimes it is, most times, it's just shopping). I remember birthdays somewhat more faithfully because of Facebook; I can find things, and information, quickly. But I don't feel anymore a part of the world than I did before, because the internet still is, in the end, just more world, and my place in it remains as it ever has been - 1 of billions of voices. And a voice that hates joining things, to boot.
In the end (he said punctually, knowing that there's no end), writing online is pretty much like writing in a diary that you wouldn't mind somebody stumbling across and reading. Lame, sort of, but worthwhile, sort of. Ken Burns might use something I said in a documentary someday, like some pioneer's letter. If I win the posterity lottery.
I am not asking to hear that people are reading - I know the 3 people who read my writing with any regularity, and they know I appreciate it. And I'm not asking if I *should* continue, because that's a losing game (the answer, honestly, would have to be No). I may just be writing this to let some random other person, or maybe the dude at Debriefing, know that somebody else feels/things about this. But more than likely, I just wanted to think about it, and now I have done that.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Settler Jep, October 2013
