Why Start a Blog?

In the earlier days this question would probably follow ‘what the fuck is a blog?’ and ‘is it contagious? Do I need a laxative?’ Nowadays we’re a little more clued up, or at least, we like to think we are. We ask non toilet related questions, such as: are you doing it for money? Are you doing it to get a career? And, more importantly, do you think you’re talented enough? What have YOU got to say?

New blogs pop up every day (hello), some about cars, some about fashion (a lot about fashion), and some that don’t seem to be about anything at all. Blogs, I like to think, are like dogs. Dogs are all of the same species but not of the same breed. People never confuse a Great Dane with a Pug, similarly you wouldn’t confuse a blog on politics with the pretty pictures of fashiontoast.com. The one thing that connects them all is the blog DNA which can be broken down into the genetic alphabet of html, awkward sentence structures, exclamation marks, and neurosis.  Mostly neurosis.

On the subject of dogs, here's mine. I like dogs, I like them a lot.

And this is the problem I have with modern day blog culture. Because blogs boil down to one thing – the person writing them. They’re all about opinions, about a person’s selfhood and beliefs.  And when you take someone’s selfhood and question its commercial value, it’s worth, its money making potential, then you’re really entering into something quite perverse, and I don’t mean that in a good way. For example, a friend opens up a blog. It’s nothing ground breaking, just little snippets of her day, what she thinks about new fashion trends, how she does her make-up; you know, girly stuff. In the old days we may have all coo’ed and called it ‘cute’. Instead we have people, usually Londoners, asking: what’s the point? Where’s the big picture? The pithy female intellect? Why the fuck do we care about what colour her nails are, unless it’s in high resolution and photography artfully next to a mile of pastel coloured macaroons?

People no longer accept blogs as cute little side projects you take up to kill time on your lunch break, now it’s almost a career. Cute doesn’t cut it anymore kid, the world demands PROFESSIONALISM.

Nothing says professionalism like a pink laptop and a take-away carton on the side

Now in my experience, when it comes to matter of the self, people in general are far from professional. The Coca-cola is professional, the brand of one Heather Shaw, is not. For instance, professional is slink and shiny. It’s polished cherry red with crisp, clear white writing. When I try and wear any white it usually has a Bolognese stain on it within half an hour. As a person I cannot be professional. In a job I can put on professional looking clothes, talk for a few hours with a British sense of what being professional is, but as a whole, me as a person, cannot be professional. And I strongly question whether anyone out there can – even politians.

Why then am I starting a blog? I’ll tell you.

1)      Because by naming said blog WizardFaces, it finally gives my twitter account of the same name, some purpose. I had mistakenly thought a username required quirky imagination and nonsense words, like most usernames do on other sites. This was before I actually took a closer look at twitter and saw everyone else using simple variations of their name like: steve_010 or Jane_EM. Making me feel a crazy beatnik who’s just walked into the Ad Agency in Mad Men and started singing marijuana-induced love songs to Jon Hamm.

2)    Because I want to wade through the bullshit that surrounds blog culture and dump myself (almost literally) onto the internet and go – this is me, this is what I think. Yes I may try and be pithy, yes I may even try to make you (the reader, who if rumours are to be believed, may or may not exist) laugh, and hell, maybe one day I’ll sit down figure out what all this HTML shit is about and make this blog all clean lines and nicely sized font. But other than that, this is not a career venture. This is not some trap in the advertising forest trying to snatch up some sponsors. All this is, is one twenty year old student, sitting at a laptop and trying to articulate one thought a week to you – the reader.

It’s me, nothing else that will drive this blog. I sat long and hard trying to think up a theme, some concrete genre this blog could be placed in (a student orientated cooking blog may or may not have been thrown around) but in the end I’m not just one concrete element. DNA is built up from more than just one gene that decides you’re prone to fart a lot. It’s about variety, expression, about being HUMAN. Having one post about where women stand in society and the social ramifications of state-controlled contraception, and then another on why I like to watch reruns of The Hills and why it got so crap when Lauren left. It’s not shiny, it’s not slick – it is a mutt, many breeds jammed into one misshapen, multi-coloured fur ball that will probably wee on the new run and chew up the sofa. But at least it’ll wag its tail in the process.