I haven’t blogged recently, not for a lack of thoughts worth blogging (though perhaps a doubt in my ability to express said bloggable thoughts adequately is encouraging the drought) but for a panoplic plethora of thoughts and ideas Infinite Jest is bringing to light. Reading this book is something which demands intense thought and concentration, and often leaves you drained, but in the best way possible. I’m still far behind the pack, so I don’t expect to be writing much here for a little while longer — though as Joe Hill noted on his twitter feed, these notes of delay are often shortly followed by frequent bursts of activity so let’s not say it’s impossible that I’ll be writing more before the end of the month.

Well, not really. I’m probably gonna keep writing here until someone pays me to stop, because I like writing and ranting. But this blog is dead from a monetary perspective. These words will never make me money, because my blog is not a niche blog. I don’t focus on one thing alone. Sure most of my posts involve television in one way or another, but I don’t limit my words.

And niche blogs are the only kind that can last in this new web, where there are literally hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, with a large majority of them being useless chatter about whatever’s on the author’s mind. That is, just like mine. So I’m a drop in an ocean. The sheer density of the blogosphere makes it nigh impossible for a blog that doesn’t have very frequent very insightful very narrowly focused content to be seen amid the detritus.

But, as the little subheading of my blog says, everything matters. I could very easily devote this blog to television, or to science fiction, or to science fiction television, or to mid-90′s science fiction television, or to any number of painfully constructed microverses, but I’d rather do my own thing.

One factor that comes into play is my generally lackluster writing capabilities. I don’t consider myself a bad writer, and on certain days I might even be a good writer, but it takes more than that to be noticed. For every well-written insightful niche blog there are dozens more that write about the same things but with less clarity and fewer readers. So, in my particular case, the damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t problems inherent in my unexceptional prose also decrease my incentive to overspecialize.

But there’s more than just that pragmatic urge at work when I make the active decision to write broadly¹. Good storytelling does more than focus. While my material on this blog is primarily “non-fiction” I generally draw my writing inspirations from the world of fiction. The best television shows out there are the best because, aside from creating a compelling foreground, the effort exerted on the background reifies that world.

And while I’m not creating a world, I am defining a world: the world as I see it. If this blog were focused on one thing in particular, you would know that that one thing is important to me, but that’s all you’d know. And I don’t think that’s enough. I think that to find my stance on anything to be of value, you need more than just that stance. You need to see the words written here as coming from a person, to judge them beyond their surface structure. It needs to come from a living person. So this blog is dead, but I am very much alive².

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Footnotes

1. The next example is going to be about television, so I hope you’ll enjoy the irony. [↩]
2. If you’re reading this after I’ve died, clearly that last point is no longer valid. [↩]

The Dollhouse review/recaps I’ve been writing thus far have varied wildly. This is because I have two conflicting desires when it comes to reviewing a specific episode of television. Most blogs out there give brief glib reviews of any given episode. They will on occasion focus on the little details that make an episode especially good, but overall they gloss over these details and what they do focus on, they interpret incorrectly. Outside of this world, there’s Television Without Pity. Television Without Pity focuses on detailed recaps of episodes with nearly shot by shot descriptions written with humour in mind. These recaps tend to focus more on the facts of an episode with mythology and character development often being left unexplored.

Both of these techniques work as well as they can, but my desire, when examining an episode, is to explore all of this. I want to examine every scene for deeper meaning while not forgetting to describe the actual factual plot of the story. I don’t want to simply describe a scene, but explore the underlying assumptions the characters exert on the scene. All of this is maddeningly difficult to accomplish without writing 5000 words. (One recapper on Television Without Pity, Jacob, gets close to my ideal. His recaps are a little too abstract and shoegazy most of the time, but at least he’s really trying to understand the show he’s writing about.)

At the end of my 3500 word recap of the fourth episode of Dollhouse I hadn’t really explored the subsurface of the story as much as I would have liked and I’d also been too dry in my depictions of the scenes for my taste. Finding that perfect balance between humour, pathos, analysis, and explanation is something I don’t think any site or any writer has accomplished yet. Which is why I don’t hold out any hope for me achieving such perfection. But I gotta try.

John August wrote about the changes occurring in society and culture and personality that the internet and online life can introduce. He’s generally more enthused about facebook and twitter and the like than I am — though I go through cycles regarding this and am shifting towards usage again, I think — but he raises a couple interesting points which I grazed by in my post about facebook but, naturally, he gets the point across much better:

We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

There is a level of permanence to your persona that wasn’t there forty years ago. Becoming a new man, à la Don Draper, is hardly feasible in this world where your blog’s archive sits there for all to read, where your twitter updates lay in neat chronological order, where the photos on your facebook page sit waiting to be found and reported on. I don’t know if it’s a good idea. But it’s certainly where we’d headed.