Blogging about blogging: further notes.

In which the blogger expands and asserts an addendum to comments provided in the previous post.

ㅁ If you haven’t posted on your blog for a while, don’t apologize about it. It’s boring for one thing, and if the regrets are intended for family members, probably an email or a note on FB would more useful. I have a theory that one of the most commonly typed sentences in the blog world starts off, “Sorry I haven’t posted for a while …” It’s especially sad to see this at the top of a blog and notice that the date on it is 6 months in the past.

ㅁ Blogging is public speaking, just (perhaps) quieter. It’s a bad idea to stand up in front of a crowd of people, have your say, and then think you can remain anonymous. It might happen, but don’t be surprised when it doesn’t.

ㅁ A blog often displays creative work of some kind – but it also in itself an artifact of creation. The blogger will choose how the thing looks, whether to include images or only text, whether to have a unique visual style to the appearance of the page or to simply use a template of a variety already in use by hundreds of other people. All of these things are choices. Choice is at the center of every creative activity.

ㅁ Use of certain forms of vocabulary will attract some readers and disturb others enough to pass you by and never come back. This might actually be what you want. You decide. The result of that choice will do a lot to determine who your eventual audience might be, assuming you want an audience at all. (I’m speaking of swear words, of course, but also overly-intellectual jargon-ish terms and sentence patterns.)

ㅁ As a blogger do I need to care very much about making other people happy? Personally, I think not. It’s a tough job, anyway, and chancy at best, to try to please other people – in fact, one point of view is that other people’s happiness is a pretty impossible thing to achieve. As with most things in life, the best shot I’ve got is just trying to make myself happy –a lot of time and energy can be spent and others will be pleased or not according to whatever is going on with them. Doesn’t mean pissing people off randomly is the thing to do – choose the time and place for it.

ㅁ Excuse me. I feel something of a rant coming on.

Speaking for myself – and speaking to other bloggers in the Koran expatriate community – I’d appreciate it if you don’t set yourself up as some kind of spokesman or representative of whatever group or subculture you might yourself be part of, or whatever topic you might have some interest in.  If you have opinions about Korean food, or Korean cuisine as it relates to world culinary culture, fine. If you have opinions about international relations and how South Korea should be behaving toward the North, that’s fine also. If you have opinions about the way women are treated in Korea and elsewhere in the world, perhaps you have eminent credentials to talk about that, sufficient that you could reasonably be thought of as an expert on whatever topic it is. Perhaps.

All of these sorts of things are interesting to read.

Again, perhaps, depending.

However.

If you’ve lived here for a long time as an expatriate, you might – you just might – find yourself thinking that your take on things is sufficiently similar to that of other expats (or superior, if you think living here longer than others qualifies you for that kind of hubris) and that therefore you can speak authoritatively, as if your words reflect the thoughts of others besides yourself.

Please avoid this. I ask it respectfully. Especially if Korean or international media should happen to approach you for quotes, do your best to couch everything you say in forms similar to “This is what I think about that. And I’m just one person.”

The internet acronym for this is well known: IMHO. In My Humble Opinion. Please, again respectfully, try to make sure everything you say is surrounded by the attitude contained in these words.

If you try to speak for me, I will be annoyed. I know for a fact that other expats will be also. Even when I agree with what’s being said, it annoys me.

Bloggers are not politicians.

Anyway, I didn’t vote for you.

Rant over.