Back To Basics

If you really want to put the zap on your blogging mojo, you should rush out and read The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen.

I was cleaning the bathrooms and listening to our local public radio station (very, very glamorous, no?), when Keen was on air discussing how blogging is going to destroy the world.

The glut of unprofessional (his word, not mine) writing, journalism and criticism out in the blogosphere is slowly chipping away at the centralized "cultures" of the western world.

He cites very specific statistics about the number of blogs being created each minute - an impossibly large and daunting number - and how this cacophony makes it impossible for us, as cultural and media consumers, to make informed decisions about our consumption of literature, film, radio, television, news and every other aspect of the cultural spectrum.

Keen's theory is that we are reducing the people who once were the arbiters of our cultural world to pink slips, with trained critics, authors, filmmakers and newsroom employees being laid off in droves while we "monkeys with a million typewriters" bang out a bunch of crap.

I take issue with some of what Keen theorizes, and I haven't yet finished the book. And ironically, for someone who makes a strong case that blogging causes a cultural apocalypse, Keen seems to have no problem hyping his tome on - you guessed it - his Typepad blog.

However, in some ways, I can see his point.

It takes time, he says, to weed through the gazillion blogs out there and find the ones you want to read, the ones that are of value to you. Time is our most precious commodity, and where once we were able to find our information in specific, expected areas of media, now we are sometimes lost in the vast digital forest.

Yup.

I can buy that.

And I, my friends, am one of those trees obstructing your view.

I got this cool template and I put ads on my site and - I can admit it here, among friends - I got awfully cocky.

I started writing for you.

I began to assume what you wanted to read. How you wanted to be directed. What you wanted to think.

Shame on me.

I am trained in this profession, that is a fact, and so Keen cannot really accuse me of being an amateur.

I am a paid professional in the world of letters, and I earned that privilege through an arduous, costly education and a tremendous amount of personal effort and hard work.

But you don't pay me.

You come here voluntarily. You are a community, not a commodity.

I apologize for mistaking the two.

Making deliberate editorial decisions about what I will or will not write about is not appropriate for this forum. You are not looking for an expert - and I think we can all agree that I offere no parenting and/or life expertise.

Traffic is nice, sure. The small profit I see from the ads in my sidebar is helpful, and does not go unnoticed in my checking account. After all, both my husband and I are, essentially, unemployed.

But that is not why I started writing Chicken And Cheese.

So I will henceforth be writing here as I used to write over here - as if no one was reading.

As if I were writing for myself.

I hope you still want to come along with me.