Re: What's the point?
Olu is writing daily posts in November, which have been great, and recently what's the point? asked what's the point of blogging.
i get that blogging is seen as a dying art form: hard, nay, impossible to monetise; hard, no, actually, impossible to get anyone to look at your bloody posts; and hard, well, just really hard to justify right now save for just really liking being on your computer and talking to all the little queer people in it?
And it's true! Blogging probably is terrible for these things. Apart from being on your computer and talking to all the little queer people in it.
so what's the point of all this? why post at all? why care about the open web when the hounds of capitalism bang harder on the door every day?
My response isn't really useful here because I don't have even a tenuous relevance that I rely on to be able to eat. So not being on social media and not caring who looks at my posts isn't a problem for me. The hounds of capitalism can bang on the door all they like and I'm just mooning them out the window while blogging for five people and being bad at all my hobbies.
Five people can read my blog post and that's great! Five people is a nice group to have a chat with. Zero people could read it! And that's okay. I've still written it. I've thought about it and exercised my brain, clarified my thoughts, practised the writing, done the edit, hit the publish button. That's all good, useful stuff.
I'm very Art for Art's Sake about it. For me it has that intrinsic value and that's all I require of it. Maybe I just like the sound of my own voice. Everything else is just caring about outcomes. And I don't. In fact I do as much as possible to be detached from outcomes. Last week I wrote about what I can sustain an interest in even while failing horribly, where 'failing horribly' is part hyperbole and part other people's standards I don't subscribe to.
And I've written about this plenty of other times before. Oh no, maybe I need a list of all my metablogging posts. When I do write about blogging it's about being part of a community and ecosystem, thinking and writing and thinking by writing, training my brain, enjoying building my site, fighting imposter syndrome, and sharing good stuff because it's a big, scary world sometimes and it's nice to connect with people.
All I want to do is write little and weird and fun and dumb things. For me, whether people want to read them or not isn't the point.