Just when you think you've found your voice - that true writing voice that you've been looking for all your life and thought you had a solid grip on - something small comes along to rock you on your heels a little. It was a tiny little something that I only caught a glimpse of so maybe it was nothing but I think I'll maybe keep an eye on it anyway. Over the last few weeks, out of nothing more than idle curiosity I've been checking out what the web delivers as a result of searching for great blogs and variants thereof. Hmm. Try it for yourself. You'll be shocked at how you're about to be ripped off. The problem, as if I didn't know it already - is the web itself. What you have now is clever people, writing blogs with very little passion/interest/value loaded with keywords that, over a pretty short period of time, propel them into the upper echelons of a google search. This quest for popularity and visibility via technology is no different in any way, shape or form to vanity publishing, only this way, you don't actually have to part with any money.
It has even less to do with actually writing.
A couple of times, I found myself drifting into that 'ratings' train of thought and caught myself at the last minute with a big reminder, that being popular or high in the rankings isn't why I'm on the planet. These people would be better off pimping themselves out as professional web developers than masquerading as writers.
Which brings me to the very act of writing itself. If you give 1,000 people a toolbox full of spanners and a car (read keyboard and broadband), they're all bound to gravitate towards playing with it. Undoing things they shouldn't, pottering about in there tightening up bolts to see what happens, some might even think they are qualified to build a car themselves from scratch. This is plainly a bad idea but likely to happen in these circumstances. The big question - the really big question - is if we took all of these toys away - no MacBook, no internet - how many of these people would be toting around Moleskine books, maybe five or six Moleskines at a time and dumping the contents of their head into them everyday using a pen? A pen that cost no small amount of money as a mark of respect for the craft perhaps.
I know maybe 50 bloggers who never wrote a word before free blogging platforms came along. This is probably the same sort of thing all you professional photographers find. Where did all these 'supposed' photographers come from? Just because there's a camera on your phone and flickr is easy to use, doesn't mean the world needs to see your life and it sure as hell doesn't make you a photographer.
I'm not being precious, I simply think millions of people the whole world over dabbling in things they shouldn't, has cheapened and under-valued pretty much everything. Granted it's very empowering to the masses, but it's not doing humanity any favours. The longer it goes on, the worse it will get. Everybody hates the gatekeepers of old, fuck - even I hated the gatekeepers of old, but man, they did a good job on keeping the shit out of sight - and what became of those the gatekeepers rejected that were truly talented? They broke through anyway and were all the stronger for it.