It’s 5:30 in the morning and I am, as I so often do in these insomniac driven moments, trolling through blog after blog, reading every ill-conceived thought from around the world. This essay is not an indictment against blogs or this web 2.0 explosion – which arguably counts more for more media spiel than that of internet evolution…but I digress. The blog-o-sphere has skyrocketed individuals into the collective. Now it really is possible for Mr Joe Blog to have their words read by anyone across the world. Arguably, this is true democracy at its best: Freedom to write and publish anything with the possibility that your blog will enter into the collective conscience and be read around the world.

There are bloggers that I like to think would have made it entirely on their own gravitas – London’s own Style Bubble strikes me as the perfect example - I’m personally indebted to this woman. Now, this is a girl that introduced me to Black Vintage Circus (cheap ass vintage straight from Berlin, thank YOU very much) and plenty of other fashion brands around the world. Ok so she probably has her haters, and that’s fine – if only they weren’t so wrong. Not only have Vogue and Dazed picked her up, but she will probably forever remain mine (and others) one stop shop for inspiration. The problem is, that for every one blog that finds fame and fortune, another 100 exist to copy (in the most untalented form of flattery I’ve ever seen) existing style, presumably in the hope that they too will soon be added to this collective. Unfortunately, these blogs tend to remain as embarrassing reminders that most people find it damn near impossible to put forward their own unique ideas.

Here are my dear, a few simple rules that you might well want to consider before you start blogging:

1. Don’t pervade my day with your personal goings ons.

This is not the early noughties. Livejournal is dead, as is Belle de Jour (actually, she may well still be writing this ill-conceived blog but I just do not care anymore ..no one else does either, it’s dead so get over it.) The fact is, there are too many self-obsessed, narcissistic idiots out there who actually believe that their own private and personal problems are the business of the whole wide world. Combine a complete inability to keep privacy private, with the bad grammar and lack of self-reflection that these blogs traditionally contain, and you understand my problem. The fact is, these problems have no place on facebook (which at least purports to some form of privacy), and they certainly have no place on any self respecting blogger’s website (I guess that unless you happen to be mentally forever stuck in that horrific early-teen stage of adolescence, where suddenly your problem is E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E-S.) This form of bad writing has to stop.

wooooah, trippy.

2. Don’t tell me something I already know about.

Blogs became exceptionally annoying for me in around January/February last year. This coincided with the release of Animal Collective’s seminal album - Merriweather Post Pavilion. More or less EVERY blogger between the age of 16 and 25 wrote about this album. Ok, so why should I have a problem with this exactly? It’s not because I didn’t like this album, AC genuinely deserved the popularity – this is 100% not-the-problem. But (!) when an album like this gains such acclaim in such a short space of time, it’s going to be pretty obvious that people like and love it. So, you did too? More  or less every blogger around the world posted their own ‘personal’ insight on how the music was great, the artwork was fantastic et cetera… There was absolutely nothing worth reading about. The music is great, yes. The album cover is great, yes. But anyone with half an ear and eye noticed this. I would like to point out that with the more established music blogs, I Guess I’m Floating for example, they more or less ignored this album release date. For them, AC was old news. There was more exciting new music, and for them, it was far more individual to publish something different, rather than to re-hash old stories. The reason these blogs have become so successful, is precisely because they were able to ignore the collective conscience and find truly new and different music to obsess over.

3. Publish YOUR OWN material.

I’m pretty much assured that Tumblr is entirely responsible for this (Ok, so not entirely – but it certainly has made it easier.) Now people are able to re-blog as they feel fit. Entire blogs are filled with other peoples’ work and I honestly don’t understand this. Individuals around the world, filling their blogs with work that they love but that could never possibly reproduce. Essentially, these blogs tend to contain the disclaimer, ‘none of this artwork is my own’ – a simple way of informing the reader that nothing they have published is really worth reading. Tumblr logs epitomise this. It is now far too easy to re-blog anything and everything, possibly even by removing the original credit, so that the poor photographer or illustrator’s work becomes dilated, loses its original meaning and becomes lost in this never ending re-blogosphere.

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Blogs have given literally everyone with a computer and internet connection the opportunity to write, express and critic as they feel fit. Yet every great blog bleeds about a hundred lesser written doppelgangers. The fact is, (as it is in the real world) only the fewest, luckiest and most talented of writers will ever find fame or recognition this way; the rest remain purely to clog up bandwidth and waste  my time as I waddle through tired and annoyed at people’s inability to be individual.

We have – collectively – a genuine curiosity about others. Inherently the reason that I am able to write this article: I have trolled through countless blogs over the last few years, seeking out something or someone noteworthy and, invariably finding more than my fair share of crap. So what is the point? If I can accept the true democracy that the web 2.0 ‘revolution’ (blah) brings, why am I single-handedly contradicting myself and attempting to report the abhorrence of individual blogs? I guess it’s because despite a few (probably already recognised) anomalies, most blogs are forever doomed to being uninteresting, irreverent and ultimately, down right boring. Unfortunately, the very fact that now anyone with a pc and a wire can write about any old inane subject means simply that. Any idiot thinks they will soon be The Next Best Thing (while we, as anonymous readers and critics know better.)

This entry was tagged as blog, blogging, jessica arber, livejournal, reblog, tumblr.