Reasons for writing if there are any

So, I've joined the billions of people who feel like they might have something to add to the world of blogging. Why? Presumably the ideal of blogging is to move away from the traditional media outlets. They have agendas, are funded by revenue from advertising and by people who choose to buy particular publications because they know that they won't be too challenged by them, that the editorials will broadly reflect and represent their own views. This is fair enough. I've only occasionally picked up The Daily Mail (or as it's sometimes known 'The Daily Heil') but have usually ended up throwing it down after a matter of minutes, seething with rage and feeling impotent because so many people read it and believe its content to be true. Daily Mail readers would presumably experience the same feelings of anger were they to read The Guardian, labelling it leftist, liberal, wishy-washy tripe.

The function of blogging is said to be to break these boundaries and give anyone who wants a voice a fair chance. This has to be a fallacy though. Most people of a certain generation do not write or read blogs and find cultural succour in newspapers such as those mentioned above. I'm sure that in so-called 'developing' countries workers earning less than a dollar a day probably don't have the time, or indeed the education in many instances, to sit down with their Apple imac (or whatever they're calling them nowadays) and fire off a string of cutting barbs about how their employer whips them or threatens to fire them if they're not working fast enough.

So, in the main, blogs are written by the middle-classes (please disagree with me vehemently if this generalisation isn't true, although please note the caveat that I am only positing that it's true in most cases), some of whom try to represent the voices of a sub-culture or underclass that has no voice of its own. This is entirely laudable, but I am often made quite nervous by liberal interventionism, but can acknowledge it is a useful way of trying to bring unpleasant realities about a particular way life into the light of day.

Of course most blogs are read by precisely no one. Unless you break a news story, or write about some obscure band or writer who then becomes famous, or you have a lot of friends on Facebook who in turn each have lots of friends, you're speaking into a void. Even this system of friends of friends reading your work is predicated by the assumption that you're actually any good. If you're terrible, no one will give a toss.

I've gone on long enough now. I get carried away, especially when I'm bored. Sitting here in a messy living room in Glasgow, knowing that I should be using my time more productively than talking to no one.

I'll try to put up something more interesting in my next post. Apologies, I'm a blog virgin, treat me gently.

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