by Kev the Vampire:
Why am I writing this? Why are you reading it? Where do blogs come from and where are they going to?
‘In the beginning was the Word’, we are told in John 1.1, but the Bible makes no mention whatsoever of the phenomenon of blogging, even though there are now 156 million blogs, according to Wikipedia, and these blogs all produce words.
While these words are not divine they are words nonetheless — the distilled thoughts of minds that seek to impose order on the chaos of existence. But why bother?
Writing for Godot
If we write to be read then we are deluding ourselves. Our posts have no audience. Like an actor who “struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more,” we blog to the nothingness, and most blogs are “tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” And many of them are not even that.
While there are sites that count their hits in millions, such as the Huffington Post (4.5 million) and Free Republic (1 million), most bloggers rarely reach triple figures, and I for one cannot even remember the last time I made double figures. And what bloggers and hit counter junkies are keen to forget is that being ‘hit’ is not the same as being read. And being read is not the same as being understood.
More importantly, ‘blogs’ with stratospheric page views are not really blogs — they are websites that have added interactive functionality. You may be able to comment on an Economist blog or an article in the Guardian, but that does not make it a blog.
The Blog is Dead: Long Live the Blog
So, what is a blog? The word’s origin (web log) hints at an online journal, but with an added element of reader interaction. The blog has grown, however, and can now be used as a social networking tool and even a means of marketing products. Blogging, as the Economist points out, has now entered the mainstream, and the distinctions between website, blog and social networking area are becoming more and more blurred.
From Cyber Caves to Virtual Cities
Many bloggers try to remain aloof from social networking. I’ve tried myself.
These bloggers are, in their own mind at least, the lone wolf, or the hermit mystic, or the spaghetti western cowboy with a dog called Diogenes, or some other archetype. But the problem with life in the cold is… the cold. The problem with being a lone wolf, and the reason sane wolves will do anything to avoid it, is that the lone wolf cannot hunt well enough alone to feed itself. The lone wolf may not feel lonely but it will feel hungry.
And it is a similar story with that other social animal — man. We are social animals because those humans who were not social have been bred out by natural selection. Loners die childless and their genes die with them.
The hermit is the aberration, and the lone blogger, tapping into the ether, is also not the norm. Perhaps it was with this in mind, albeit at an unconscious level, that I found myself sniffing around the outer suburbs of a virtual community this morning.
O brave new world! That has such people in it!
So let us turn to online communities, such as DarkMedia City, or DMC, which ‘commissioned’ me, this very day, to write an article, following a debut post I made which pleased them, on the nature of vampires.
I was asked to write something relevant to the “‘darker’ side of entertainment.” What could be darker than DarkMedia City itself, I thought?
There is a beauty in darkness, and while many have tried to birth sites around this terrible beauty, DMC is the by far the sleekest. It is a stallion of darkness, worthy of a Nazgul, and it makes my own ‘Dark Site’ look like a flea-bitten pony in comparison. As for the denizens of the alterwelt, I cannot say. I have only sniffed at; I have not spoken to.
But there is something in the very nature of virtual communities that troubles me.
Changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born
Close your eyes and look into the mirror — the evolutionary mirror.
Humans evolved to live in tribal groups of less than a hundred and fifty, and although more than half of us now live in conurbations reaching into the millions, the size of our real social network within these cities and megacities has not really changed. It cannot change — it is hard-wired.
If you include family, friends and the work tribe that you deal with an a regular basis, then we have a network of about 150. Members come and go, but the total remains constant. We live within this tribe and ignore the rest. There are over seven million people in the City of Hong Kong, but they do not really exist for me — they are a forest of human trees I pass through.
Previously, our networks have always been determined by genetic similarity and proximity. To put it simply, we like people who are like us and who live nearby. With blogging and social networking sites, however, it is quite easy to find people similar to us living on the other side of the planet.
You, the reader, the hit on the stat counter, could be anywhere.
The DarkMedia City has no boundaries.
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After completing a psychology degree, Kev the Vampire realised that he was profoundly misanthropic and set about travelling the world looking for aliens to take him to another planet. He has written two novels (‘The Screen’ and ‘Letters from the Ministry’), a novella (‘The Inaction Man’), a book of short stories (‘Boots’) and three books on travel writing on India, China and Vietnam, but they have proven impossible thus far to sell to publishers, and so Ministry Fox has been forced to place them in POD limboland. More information on these and Vampire K videos can be found at his website: www.ministryfox.com
Kev the Vampire is also currently featured on DarkMediaCity, a free social network for those who like it Dark. Whether it be literature or film, music or art, horror or sci-fi, paranormal romance or paranormal investigation, we’ve got something for you. www.DarkMediaCity.com
(The opinions within articles, news and editorial pieces do not necessarily reflect the views of DarkMedia, its partners, sponsors or subsidiaries.)
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