I made a half-promise to myself that I would not write a post about writing itself, because it represents that inevitable phase of a writer with nothing to write about. But lately I’ve been questioning why I should be writing in the first place. And why do it publicly? (Although I’m reasonably sure I have a total readership of one at the moment, myself included.) What the hell is the purpose of putting stuff on the Internet, anyway? I’ll try to answer these questions here – more for myself than anything.
So, why write? There are many reasons, but the main reason I shall consider is that you engage in articulation; which is to say, you think your thoughts in such a way that they make sense in a sentence, or even paragraphs. Thinking in complete, coherent and cohesive sentences and paragraphs is not the normal way of thinking. Forcing yourself to do that has benefits to the outcome: what you think becomes clearer to yourself and perhaps even comprehensible to someone else. It doesn’t mean the thoughts are correct in some real-world sense, of course, but it gives you a clearer view of your own thought-landscape and can indicate where you need to do some landscaping or even if you need to rebuild completely. When you read out loud in your head the thoughts you’ve written down you’ll quickly be able to decide if they are coherent or gibberish, profound or silly. Most of the time what you discover is that the original thought was just a seed, and the final print may bear little resemblence to it, but owes to it everything. That would be the point of writing.
Another reason is that it’s a rewarding exercise in and of itself. Picking out the correct words and metaphors to paint your mindscape or communicate a point is just damned fun.
But why do it publicly? Because of what a somewhat cantankerous public intellectual has called ‘skin in the game:’ you expose the silly little products of your brain to the wider world. Your thoughts, or an approximation thereof, will be repeated in someone else’s head and you run the risk of that other head thinking the content of your thoughts completely ludicrous. Hopefully they will let you know that in some graceful manner, but probably not. Anyway, the knowledge that your thoughts can be read is there as you write and it keeps you sober. But there is a balance to be tread here. One does not want to filter oneself so much that it stifles the more free-roaming, semi-articulated thoughts. I mean the kind of thoughts that represent only the germ of an idea, trivial as it may be. Writing publicly, then, presents a risk of embarrassment, but the reward is that you can get feedback on your less thought-out thoughts and improve them in the process. Often that feedback comes from yourself as you anxiously ponder the fact that that half-baked thought you had on a Tuesday afternoon is forever scrutinizable by the full citizenry of the Internet. Skin in the game.
So why the Internet? And why this particularly lonely corner of it? Well, the beauty and horror of this place has always been that the bar for putting out content is nil. True, in places the content is increasingly being policed and censored, but the real Internet – the web sans social media – is still free. The first and last bastion of the web are personal homepages. In practice they are uncensorable. That’s partly why I’m here and not on some conglomerate platform. Besides, I like the calm. (Of course, the individual on the web still runs the risk of being ‘cancelled’ and ostracized, for which probably the only defence is anonymity.) A more personal reason as to why I’m here: I grew up on the web, so it only makes sense to dwell here still and reap the benefits of articulating my thoughts into the void.