In Cyberspace, No One Can Hear You Scream

For a while this blog only contained my published pieces, and I toyed with the idea of leaving it like that, retaining its purity and making it surely the only blog in the world where every entry had previously appeared on the pages of a reputable journal. But after a while I relented; after all, it was hardly in keeping with the whole spirit of blogging and, anyway, with Time Out's Big Smoke section being axed, taking my weekly column with it, and with the imminent closure of the London Paper my current writing outlets will have vanished within a few weeks of each other and exiled me, for now, to a life on the web.

But in cyberspace there are no rules: no word limits, no deadlines, no editorial changes, no requirement to make a point and certainly no requirement to actually write anything good. Indeed, doesn't the whole concept of blogging highlight one of the major problems of the internet, chiefly that whilst in theory anyone in the world can read your work, in practice there are so many millions of blogs out there that many of them are read by no one other than the authors themselves?

And hasn't the internet been somewhat overrated in this regard? We're always being told about how it's a great way to get yourself noticed but every time someone like Lily Allen or Sandi Thom is supposedly discovered on the web it inevitably turns out they already had publicists and record companies behind them and it was all a publicity stunt. It's the same with any blog that supposedly becomes a word of mouth success; invariably it's been written by a journalist or author with a book to promote and whose PR has spent a huge amount of time and money to create that word of mouth success.

To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I'm well aware of the irony of using a blog using the medium itself, but that doesn't change the fact that I've used my first blog to not only attack the system that supports it but to declare that, by and large, blogs are a waste of time. And that's not a very optimistic start, is it?*

* No, not really.