Tiptoeing around the Blogosphere

Ah, I know. As I stumble round the WordPress back office, trying to make sense of this system – what is a page, what is a post, what is a category –  I begin to ‘get it’. Not how to manage the site, because that’s still a mystery and I can only hope and pray that the more I do it the more I crack it. I can always delete stuff if it’s just too embarrassingly banal. What I’m ‘getting’ is that I have some kind of deep rooted resistance to blogging. The phenomenon by which any old or young Thomasina, Richenda or Harriet can share their embarrassingly banal thought processes with the whole entire world is one of which, I suppose, I am deeply suspicious. Everyone’s a publisher, right? But which of us is an editor? There’s an ocean of drivel out there, and do I want to to add to it? No, I want to add meaningful contributions to humankind’s cumulative understanding of itself, its behaviour and how that can and must be changed in preparation for the New World. Not just more drivel, for God’s sake.

This kind of reticence (highly unusual for me, I’m the original show-off) used to pop up when I was editing magazines. I had to really brace myself to use the word ‘I’, which I was finally able to persuade myself to use in editorials. Then I started writing a column for the design magazine FX, which, as any column does, depends on the individual columnist’s individual view of the world. So I got over it. Now I’m struggling with it all over again. It’s like a master craftsman laying bare the step by step processes by which he or she arrives at his or her chef d’oeuvre, and which in and of themselves are nothing special, but they are secret. Somehow detracts from the value and true beauty of the work. Not that I’d remotely claim to be a master craftsman, of course. I am a writer born and bred, yes. But I am also an editor born and bred, and I’d rather say nothing than add a few more drops to the ocean of drivel. Where are we going with this? Is it just more drivel? (It’s actually a test to see where this post appears when I click ‘Publish’. I put a version of it up on AidanWalker.co.uk and I have completely lost it. No idea how to get it back.)