This post is different in that I am going to discuss my motivation behind reading blog posts, to show why and how an average person reads blogs. If you are going to write a blog, you need to understand how readers read and what their motives are. The narrative for this post is circular rather than sequential, a result of reading a lot of Emerson.
Blogging is about networking. It’s about sharing. Most blog readers are also blog content producers. It’s a give-and-take environment where each parades themselves to the front of the room for their turn at show-and-tell. Or it is like a banquet where everyone brings a dish to pass. And the dishes brought by the singles are the ones that seem to have more flavor, although they might not be as edible, an acquired taste.
Everyone blogs to share their ideas, from the photo blogger with scores of likes, networking with photos of travel, nature, historical, and artistic perspectives, to the solipsistic recluse looking to share themselves but too awkward to press like on anyone else’s posts for fear of revealing themselves to the contrariness of others by showing what they like. Everyone has a story to tell about their experience: poets speaking of their thrownness, painters and illustrators sharing their vision and expressing their emotions, photographers showing us the beauty in the mundane, and philosophers sharing what they have acquired through their psychic travels. The artist in everyone taps into the network of human expression and verifies their own unique experience by being part of the community.
With these things in mind, I reveal how I read blogs.
Like many, I have a full-time job in addition to preparing content. In my case, I write poetry, fiction, and essays. I don’t have writer's block at this point in my life. I have trouble with the time to write. To have readership on a blog of any kind, you have to be a reader of other blogs, or others won’t find you. Blogging is about reading first, in that networking is about being discovered.
And there is such a thing as over-discovery. If readers are discovering you for the first time and see you post 3x a day, keep changing the timestamp on your posts, and flooding their feed with posts that have under 10 likes, it shows the reader that you should probably condense, edit, and post far less frequently. You are like the musician who produces an album every year and grows stale to listeners, saturating the market with his music. Soon, everyone scrolls right past all your posts and misses the one diamond in the rough they may have liked. This isn’t the reader being callous, it’s the reader utilizing their time more wisely. Instead of 4 posts a day, try posting once. Instead of trying to keep all those posts with a few likes green by re-timestamping them, do a quote post, talk to your readers, tell them why you are reposting that particular poem, or whatever.
The average reader has a very short attention span. Most people don’t read the entire short story before clicking like. If it takes longer than 60 seconds to read, your reader's response drops dramatically. A reader scrolls. What I do is click on something that catches my attention, then spin the wheel on the mouse to see how much I have to read. Right now, I would rather not fill my time with reading short stories, memoirs, essays, or poems that will take more than a couple of minutes. I will make an exception sometimes for philosophical inquiry. I do not read block writing. If the writer doesn’t have time to use punctuation at least in a minimalist way, they are impinging on my free time making my brain do the horse work when reading. I don’t have time for that—no offense to the readers and writers who like that sort of expression.
I like to subscribe to blogs with content that speaks to me personally, so those posts are always in my feed. I don’t follow political content, so if I mistakenly subscribed to a blog that regularly posts political content, I will unsubscribe. No offense to the writers of these blogs. It is just something that I don’t want to read anymore. I have had my stomach full of political crap thanks to the news hosts who fill the airwaves with their contentious bickering and self-righteousness. I realize that, as Jim Morrison said, the music can’t help but reflect the political situation, but that doesn’t mean I have to engage in analysis of everyone’s stupid opinion.
And political opinion is stupid. Educated stupidity, a rhetorical gun pointed at straw enemies, pulling us all into a wave of misdirected emotion. Politics is a puppet atmosphere still being driven by that Horatio Alger bullshit about prosperity being just around the corner if it wasn’t for the government. No matter the political rhetoric, who is or isn’t “in charge,” the numbers of the downtrodden, those who think they are oppressed, continue to grow. The same dirty trailers dotting the countryside, with their “Keep Out” signs and their pistols for protection against government or whatever, for the past 50 years. Same simpleton bullshit used in every society by every politician who ever existed. Nothing changes. I don’t want to blog about it or read someone’s idea that some political party is to blame for our existence.
But I also don’t want to read how some religion, savior, or spirituality is the answer for anything, either. When I was younger, I had my identity, spirituality, and meaning in life stolen while I was being fed a straw man’s existence. I will be 85 years old, and some 20-something Jehovah’s Witness will ask me if I have a plan for my life. I don’t want to read or hear any proselytizing. Everyone is born with a light in their heart. How they use it is up to them. I believe in study and observation. But I also believe in just being what feels natural.
And for me, floating in nothingness with awareness telling itself it is bad and to get over itself by trying not to think of itself is plain redundant. I will not, and do not need to, try to eliminate the self in any way. Without the self, there is no existence. All animals have self-awareness. Only the human tries to tell himself that this is bad and tries to “meditate” the I away. So, I don’t care for quantum poetry because, to me, when I read it, it sounds negative. It misses the phenomenon of physicality and mind, the very thing it is supposed to point to. It becomes like the finger that gets the attention. My body doesn't respond; only my mind does. However, I do read quite a bit of haiku because there is profundity in the simplest of sayings. Although there are usually a multitude of contradictions that go with it.
I give you the theater of my mind so that you think of your own mind and how you read the blogs of others, not to argue with me. So please, no religious or political comments. I am discussing a person’s motives for reading, and there is no right or wrong in that. Because it is very much a personal affair, the blogs we like and react to. If someone doesn’t share a like, it doesn’t mean anything personally. Each has their reasons. I read what I like. But if a person only has a few likes per post, it will be reflected in their writing.
Very few bloggers are going to take the time to read someone, no matter how much they might like the writing, if they aren’t acknowledged over time. And we come to see a pattern in the writing of the solipsist diarist’s thinking that usually reveals a blind spot. You know, something the writer doesn’t see because of intense self-awareness, but everyone reading notices. Usually, someone overindulging in their feelings, giving lip service to an innate humanity, but painfully showing inhumanity with religious perspectives about crowds and people in general, whom they never have any contact with, the self-disingenuousness of the solipsist. Wants to believe he is more human than he really is and that others don’t understand him, so he tries to write his way into some inner balance by posting diary-like confessions 3x a day.
There are literally millions of blogs to choose from. Again, it’s called networking. It would be simple arrogance to think that your writing is going to be so invaluable on a blog that people should read it regardless of whether you read them. Bullshit. Many, many superior writers don’t have readers because they have this notion. A blogger is not a writer in the traditional sense. Blogging is a way for writers to have a readership. But it must be earned by showing value beyond laying some words out there for others to consume. There is always another blog to discover, and that blogger might actually like something I write, too. We have each other’s attention. Networking. So if I stop liking someone’s blog posts, it's not about the person. If it were, I would unsubscribe. You simply lost my attention. It isn’t my privilege to read to you. It is your privilege to have a blog reader. And I wouldn’t have liked you in the first place if I didn’t want to network with you.
Perhaps in the future you will want to make a book out of your best posts. You won’t be able to do that until you understand that as a blogger, your best posts are the ones that get the most attention, not the ones you personally like best. You shouldn’t have any posts you do not like personally. But your audience will tell you what ones they would read in a short story collection, as opposed to ones you might include in your personal diary.
This post is longer than I like for WordPress. So if you read this far, I applaud you. And appreciate you because I surpassed my own limit of attention on a single post.
A few more things before I lay this post to rest.
I am happy that people find strength and personal guidance from religion, only because it makes them happy. But it doesn’t make me happy. I won’t discuss my personal life, but, as a person who had his identity stolen by his parents, family, and friends, his personal spirituality denounced and disrespected by almost everyone claiming to be spiritual or religious, I have no tolerance for proselytizing.
Growing up Catholic in Ottawa County, Michigan, exposed me to some of the most wicked prejudice and bigotry imaginable. Children of pastors and deacons would challenge me to fights on the school bus. Evangelicals refused to talk to my parents. Hell, one minister giving my uncle’s eulogy told a group of us Catholics that he doubted my uncle was going to heaven because of “his choice of belief.” Then he stood glaring, daring us to contradict him. Later, I was kicked out of the house because I refused Catholicism as an adult, and was scorned for the rest of my life by my entire family. I went on to study comparative religion in grad school. So I have little tolerance for moralism. And I most certainly do not share the authoritative moral opinion of the three Abrahamic religions. That is all I ever want to say about that on WordPress.
I subscribe back, eventually, unless you are a religious writer or are using a blog primarily to market and promote. Also, I would rather read the individual poet than a post from an eZine, because if an eZine publishes multiple times a day with poems that produce likes in the single digits, no one is going to discover you anyway. You are only bringing YOUR readers to that eZine if they publish you. However, I do read many eZines, regardless of the number of likes they receive. The content may be good even if the editors lack an understanding of networking.
If you are a poet and get 30 likes routinely on your posts, it shows your readers appreciate you, even if they don’t always read the whole post. Sometimes people are tired or can’t focus. Or don’t care for your post. Nothing personal. It doesn’t mean they think it, or you sucks. Your post didn’t touch them, and that’s fine. It’s like how your favorite song is probably not the favorite song of those around you. Just doesn’t touch them like it does you.
The point is that every reader is like a publisher to whom you are submitting your post. Your content may not fit their perspective at the moment. It isn’t their privilege to read you. If I like what I see, it has nothing to do with your ability, your humanity, or anything within your control. It is about my mood and milieu at the time. I am bringing my present body awareness, with all its baggage and accessories, to what I am reading at the moment. Never mind all that mindfulness thinking. I have a mood disorder. I have used qigong and meditation techniques for 40 years. Please, no lectures. I don’t have the time to post about my knowledge and lifelong learning in Kungfu, Taoist, and Buddhist breathing techniques, and healing in all kinds of traditions. I don’t want to advertise it or engage as a teacher. It is my personal choice, and I wish it to be respected. I won’t try to “teach” others mindfulness or spirituality, and don’t ask it to be taught to me.
It’s about how a person reacts to something you write with their own body experience, awareness, and perspective. When I press like or leave a comment, it is because the comment was either requested or is something positive. Blogging is not an art class where your piece is laid out there for everyone to critique; it’s not a dissertation that is to be picked apart. It is enough not to like it if it doesn’t suit your mind at the time. Maybe something else that person has posted will be more likable. But it will have nothing to do with what the writer may think, because the writer has no idea what that reader is bringing to the table, or what their state of mind might be when they read it
And remember, that person with scores of 0-1 likes on their posts, the one who tries to get attention by picking apart the work of someone else, drawing attention to their nonexistent understanding of literary critical analysis, and their over-the-top and tiresome diction that died with Lester Bangs…is it really worth trying to gain their attention? A person with 20-30 likes on their posts and who likes just one of your posts is more valuable than 10 Lester Bangs wannabes. Unless you are a Lester Bangs wannabe, of course. Thankfully, fewer and fewer people remember who he was. I loved him as a kid, reading Creem Magazine. But I grew to dislike his style intensely because every adolescent-minded yahoo who ever lived could look to Lester Bangs as the savior of their personal expression by insulting someone, giving them the delusion that the public wanted to read stupid horseshit simply because someone wrote it. Lester Bangs wrote stupid horseshit, but he was THE someone who wrote it. Everyone who came after him is just another replica.
Anyway, thanks for reading. And thank you to all of you who read my posts. I probably read yours as well. Kin follows kin. Like minds drawn together. Peace.
R. Jay
