The first one

This is my very first blog entry, and tradition demands that I write a little bit about why this is my first post, why I'm such a late entrant; after all, one might think, blogs were invented a long time ago, and web-diaries were around before that. So why now? Why February 1st, 2007?

It's not entirely an irrelevant question. For this is the same person who, when asked his opinion of blogs by some other guy who must have had far too much time on his hands, railed against them in the most startling manner. They are too glib, he postulated. Smack of self-indulgence and whimsy, he proposed. Inspire uninteresting people to publish their tepid opinions before an all-accepting world, he argued. The thoroughness of his verbosity would have indicated an underlying cynicism to none but the most wary.

It's true; for the longest time, I detested blogs. Actively. I did my best to formulate negative opinions about each blog that I came across, opinions that I would later visit upon hapless friends and acquaintances.

It got a little old after a while. I began to think about my arguments against 'bloggery', (as I called it), and discovered that those arguments were superficial, at least for the most part.

Consider one of my objections above. 'Blogs smack of self-indulgence and whimsy', I used to say (I still like to say it because it's a nice little soundbite that scares away pro-bloggers). In fact, this, by my examination of the 'blogosphere', seems to be one of the primary reasons for the existence of a blog. Everyone has opinions, and now, with weblogs, can express them at a moment's notice.

But this is stupid (pejorative? Perhaps. Sue me.). Of course they're self-indulgent! Of course they're whimsical! That's the whole point, you more-on! Exhorting bloggers to be less self-indulgent is like exhorting a comedian to stop making jokes, or asking a dominatrix to be more submissive. If a raison d'être can ever be ascribed to something as obviously vast and diverse as the blogosphere, it would have to be the perpetuation of the self.

And I have nothing against such self-indulgence. In fact, this first post is arguably self-indulgent, and I have no doubt at all that the ones to follow will be equally so.

Does this make me a hypocrite? To a degree. The fact that I admit the truth here is encouraging, and at least a little cathartic (In fact, that is one of the tentative aims of this blog; to tell the truth).

So we agree that my primary reason for hating blogs was no reason at all. So did I hate blogs at all? Or was this prevarication rearing its equivocal head again?

No, it wasn't. I didn't like blogs, though the reason was not nearly as simple as I thought it might be. It took me a few years to understand it, but here is what I think it is -- I didn't (don't) like them because they're too...sell-outish.

Sorry, forced to coin a word there, but you know what I mean - they tend to cater to the masses. When people blog it seems like they're writing (at least partially)for an audience, and not for themselves. One can observe this sell-outishness (yes, I'm going to stick with the word) in most blogs fairly easily. For example - when people tell you what they're listening to, they're being sell-outish. When they're sending around memes, they're being sell-outish. When they put up little links of their friends blogs up on their websites, they're being sell-outish.

Maybe this is a little unclear, so let me define sell-outishness - it is the component of a blogger (or any creator of content, for that matter) which encourages him to write(create) with an audience in mind. Advertisement, in other words. When you advertise anything, or if you (knowingly) take part in an ad for yourself, you're being a sellout. A caterer.

And I'm not suggesting that there's anything wrong with that. Selling oneself is ineluctably intertwined with one's life. If you're a prospective employee, you have to sell yourself to the recruiter. If you're the recruiter, you have to sell your company (unless you're Google) to the employee. If you're a writer who has just finished writing his first book, you have to sell yourself to your agent (unless you're Zadie Smith, who was auctioned away to the highest bidder. Sniff.). Heck, even Steve Jobs had to sell the iPod concept before it became the cachet it currently is.

I recognize that all this is the natural course of things. In order to live, one must seek constant approval. But it's also true that there must be some part of you that is pristine, sincere, truth-seeking; and keeping an audience in mind when you write something makes it harder for yourself to stay truthful, because there's always someone else that you're aware of that changes what you write. Advertisement precludes sincerity and obfuscates the truth.

So I have decided that this blog shall exist in a vacuum. No one shall know of its existence, save perhaps two or three really close friends. I shall take or drop no names, and to keep things really truthful I shall keep my own name out of it. I will not cater or sellout; instead, I shall try to tell the truth, while I stand in uffish thought.