This Fall, I’ll be teaching a four-session course in “The Art Of The Blog,” a subject I have been immersed in for some years and which I feel very strongly about. Blogs have become a profoundly important of our evolving culture. They are, in many ways, the new newspaper, the new book, one of the most powerful means of affirmation and expression in human history. They are a critical element of the contemporary creative life. My blog has become the most important element in my creative work. Blogs are also feared and misunderstood by many people.
Many people are reluctant to start a blog, they are anxious about losing their privacy, about exposing themselves to ridicule or hostility, about seeming presumptuous, about sharing too much of their lives with strangers. They have lots of excusesThese concerns generally occur along generational lines and they also raise a lot of gender issues. Older people are not often at ease with this kind of exposure, this putting oneself out in the open. Blogs are not dangerous, but many people are anxious about the climate online.
Most of the hostility online comes from men, and the combative and war-like political blogs are almost always conceived by men, who bring their aggressive style of interactions online. Women write nasty things, too, as I can testify, but I think many of the better blogs are from women, who communicate more naturally and understand that the best blogs share emotional and experience, not just opinion. I have worked hard to keep my blog free of conflict and hostility, and I am proud it is a safe place for people to come.
I believe blogs are essential for creative people, the Internet has become the dominant media in the world, and people who wish to remain relevant and share and sell their work need to understand them. They are the most effective way to reach the people who buy books, art and who are curious about ideas. In the course of writing on this blog, scores of people have written me to say bedlamfarm.com has inspired them to begin their own blogs, and I have also seen my students in the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop learn the power of the blog as a creative, not a technical tool. Their blogs are thriving. I love those messages, they lift my heart.
Blogs for me are not about technology, I am not a technical person. They are about individual expression, and about empowerment. It is easy to toss up a blog, they are free, hard to create a good one. That takes faithfulness, hard work and persistence. It took three or four years before bedlamfarm.com really began to grow, and it’s growth involved time, photography, social media and old fashion blood and sweat. I resolved at the beginning to be open, to share my life, not just be another site selling stuff. I also committed to posting regularly and frequently so people would see something new when they came here.
I have always refused to post comments on the blog, this is a monologue, not a dialogue or an argument. I do allow comments on Facebook they are interesting, useful and almost always civil. Social media is important, but I believe the blog is more important. The blog feeds Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram and most recently, my podcasts. The blog is the engine that drives the rest, the center of the work. Bedlamfarm.com received more than 130,000 visits last month.
Social media is very useful, very important, but the vast majority of comments and notifications are not useful, thoughtful or necessary. Social media is communistic in that everyone’s pages look more or less the same. Blogs are fiercely individualistic, each one is very different from. The blog’s true fathers were Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, two patriots who did not believe in big media but saw media as democratic, personal and individual. The first journalists were farmers who posted pamphlets up on their pasture fences for people to read as they past by. Media became hopelessly corrupted when corporations took over our communications networks and made them all about marketing information for profit.
Media was never conceived to be noxious corporations marketing anger and violence and conflict for profit. Media was always meant to be us – individuals who care about their world and are willing to express their own values and opinions. Blogs teach writing, expression, the development of thoughts and ideas.
Jefferson’s dream sounds like a blog to me. The corporatizing of media – cable news networks – are a nightmare, not a dream. I’m looking forward to teaching the art of the blog, to discussing notions of blog writing, creativity, integration with social media and issues relating to privacy and community. Blogs are not about software. They give each of us the opportunity to express our selves, our lives, our faith and our values. They are about the growth and preservation of ideas and values and their free expression in the world. And done well, they are art in the truest sense.