Scrawled in Wax

When I find myself , as I often do, in the familiar position of explaining what blogs are to ‘non-webbish’ folks, one of the key ideas that comes up is that of persistent updating – that the difference between blogs and other forms is that they are openly processual and explicitly about the contemporary. While this if of course not a hard and fast rule, it is quite prevalent; there would, for example, be little purpose in me setting out to write about the puppy torture video today, but a mere 2 days after it circulated through internet culture. While some would see this as the decline of Western Civilization, all forms have their constraints and this insistence on the current is but one that shapes blogging.

It is this sense of contemporaneity – that everyone rushes to write on a topic at the same time and then stops just as suddenly – that has been on my mind lately. And, oddly enough, it began with the rather banal and common observation that, well, a lot of middle-aged white bloggers are often to be found ‘giving props’, complimenting programmers on their ‘mad skillz’ and punctuating their sentences with ‘fo’ shizzle’. So fine – while it’s a bit chuckleworthy at times, I’m all for the expansion and evolution of language and the mixing of smart, analytical writing with informal humour. Umm, yo. So it’s not a criticism at all, especially since some bloggers who I really like are ardent practitioners of the art.

What is interesting to me, however, is (as usual) the reason: why do white middle-aged bloggers start to use the language of youth, slang that itself has already filtered from one demographic group (non-white inner-city youth) to another (white suburban youth). I would suggest that it has to do with blogging’s insistence – some would say obsession – with remaining current. The past fifty years or so has seen North American culture increasingly locate and reference the ‘new’ in youth experience, in the ebb and flow of ‘what the kids are listening to’, doing and saying. If a key to being an effective blogger is remaining up-to-date – where a story 2 days old is, quite literally, ‘old’ – then part of the blogger’s arsenal of displaying her/his modernness will be in language, in the use of terms that are themselves cutting edge. Yes, of course, we all ironically use terms like ‘dope’ and ‘wicked’, deliberately using slang from our own youth for a laugh – but by and large, we are also often in a fight to be first, to post first, to get there before anyone else – and we often use language to mark out our connection to ‘the current of the current’. (Note: the ‘we’ here is bloggers in general as, so far, I haven’t actually become a middle-aged white man).

I do think, however, that the predictable fears of infantilising blogging are unfounded. These terms are used with a wink and a nod and, if one is to take a blog like Mathew Ingram’s as an example, the occasional giving of props does nothing to degrade the quality of writing or thought. What is interesting though is to again think about blogging as both a response to and producer of social and ideological conditions – in this case, that a culture has increasingly focused on newness which is in turn accelerated and concentrated by the technical and cultural nature of blogging and the internet. But now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to neogaf to determine what is now considered the latest example of an epic fail.