These days I came across several blogs about blogs. Now this is something that marks a new stage of the (d)evolution of this cultural phenomenon.
As a whole, the blog is a manifest of the modern-days’ extreme individualism which has accelerated to an extent where everyone can occupy others with himself, reaching a level where the focus is the person, the single individual with everything in-around him, neglecting the rest of the world.
The structure is like the structure of our perception of the time: they move forward, flow like a river and most of the post are specified over a particular slice of time and out of that area they are either not understandable or just out-of-place. Actually blogs can be viewed as the „material“ equivalent of our memory- a fact that support this, for example, is that I can’t open some of my early posts here. Reading one’s blog’s past can be extremely intriguing but also [a bit] painful- as is the past of each human being; and whether the reader is allowed to express his/her opinion. one can never enter the same river twice; so it is kind of frozen time moment.
Blogs talking about blogs and blogging is a stage similar to, let’s say, the books explaining how to write a book. This means that the whole phenomenon has reached a degree of adolescence. The new cultural „creature“ has started to analyze itself proposing strategies for attain higher level of success, larger auditory, more widespread influence. Having started this autoreferential dialog, the blog has opened two doors on its way. The first one will lead it to an endless dialogical circle where the main focus of blogging will be the blogging itself, and thus sooner or later the whole event will be suffocated by its own uselessness and the system will collapse, not being able to set itself free and open to new themes and forms. On the other hand, blog can turn into something new, overcoming itself and adapting to the new cultural situations and tendencies in the (global) thinking. What can be seen now is the metamorphosis which has taken as a motivating factor the advertising and business as common. Sad, isn’t it?
Firstly created as a way of keeping in touch with the other around you, something like a „news bulletin“, if you don’t like the conception of the web-diaries, blog then evolved in a „personal magazine“- a place where you the writer can present topics he finds interesting- a sort of „come-true-dream“ for all of us everyone who has wanted to become a writer or at least have one (or more?) magazines. Then the blog decided that it has to be fortunate for its writer(s) and it allowed ads in his sidebars and even completely made money and business its topic #1. As a result the modern readers and those who will come, if the phenomenon does not die under the changes of the culture that has created it, or its overview gets so changed that it simply stops growing, will prefer reading more specialized blogs that non-focused personal diaries. But can we assume a blog successful by the number of its readers?
What will be the future? I personally think that blog-magazines has already said their words. It seems that the blogsphere will become so large that eventually most of the personal blogs risk either to restrict their free access only to readers considered trustful by the author(s) or they’ll simply become a dry place of facts where the insight of the writer would not be reached simply because of the fear of exposing and expressing in front of the „community.“