Blogs are Evil: A Choose Your Own Adventure Story

I thought blogs would be the end of intelligence as we know it.

Not all blogs, but quick-read content, organized in numbered lists, peppered with links to here and there. I figured that most popular content on the Internet was feeding into a much bigger problem. The problem author Nicholas Carr describes as The Shallows.

To illustrate, come with me on an adventure.

Imagine: You are on a quest to find what your heart most desires. You’ve sludged through sticky swamps infested with mosquitoes, moved through melting earth rolling with molten lava, and bargained with beady-eyed business men with malicious intent.

You’ve now come upon a dense forest.

The bright sunlight is a startling contrast to the shadowy darkness of the woods. You enter the forest through a small break in the trees and feel the temperature drop, more than you would have expected. Everything is pitch black for a few moments, as if you’ve dived deep under water. You can’t tell if your eyes are still open or closed. You test this out by blinking your eyes. Once. Twice. Slowly your pupils adjust to the lack of light and glittering oddities begin to emerge in your vision.

Each tree seems to hold it’s own biosphere-different colors of moss cling to the roots, sparkling flowers sprout forth from the bark, and insects you’ve never seen before flit up and down, side to side. Each environment seems wholly contained within the radius of the tree it surrounds. Larger trees have broader and more diverse ecosystems, smaller trees extend only a few feet and glow less bright.

You take a few more steps into the forest, crossing into the boundary of one of these natural bubbles of life, and immediately feel transformed. A sensation of warmth radiates from your heart, your cheeks blush, fond memories of your first love appear in your mind. The experience is too much to pass by. You sit down right in the spot you stopped, lie back on the soft earth, and let the feelings of love and nostalgia sweep over you.

After some time, you’re not sure how long, memory brings you back to your journey, towards your heart’s desire. It takes every bit of will power you can muster to pull yourself back to standing to continue through this fantastical forest.

You get to your feet. A few more steps. And again, a transformation.

You’ve entered a new biosphere, into a pulsing orange light, pleasant on the eyes. You feel strong. You feel brave. You feel successful. You feel like you’ve achieved enough for this lifetime. So proud of yourself, so viral and firm, you feel stragely like testing your limits. You turn to the peach moss of the tree to your right, taking in the architecture of the branches. If you could take a running leap, rebound off the tree and pivot around in the air, you might be able to get enough height to grab the lowest branch. You’ve seen videos of those parkour kids in city parks doing something similar. Never have you imagined you would try, but in this state you feel so capable, it might just work…

Your journey continues, tree after tree, sensation after sensation. You can’t help but get caught up in the shiny new things, your reactions to the impressions. Days pass, sweet sleep in sleepy trees and decadent meals of exotic fruits and nectar. Weeks go by, you lose track of why you were in this mystical forest in the first place.

You have now forgotten about your heart’s desire; you are taken over by the newness, the constant change, drug from one experience to another, on no path, towards no end. You forget the journey, forget what it’s worth to you, and allow yourself to be pulled this way and that, taken by every distraction.

Over the next few years, you make your way from tree to tree. It has occurred to you there is a pattern in the wood, certain species of tree that afford certain experience. You learn to dine on experience, depending on your mood. Would you like to feel loved? Strong? Peaceful? You know just where to go.

More years pass and you have chronicled all of the species of the wood, by now intimately familiar with each biosphere, the sensation and experience each tree provides. A new feeling begins to creep in. A familiar feeling, but one that’s been absent in the forest until now. The pervasive feeling of boredom. Of restlessness. If only there was another experience, another state of being, something new again!

It begins to feel as if your days are spent walking in circles, dragging your feet to another mundane tree to experience another mundane sensation. The novelty has long since worn off and monotony has set in. You’re getting nowhere. It feels like you’re whiling away time until you die.

The forest has lost it’s magic, and you have lost your direction. You have lost contact with your heart’s desire in exchange for the novelty of adventure. And now that the adventure has played out, time and again, life has become banal. It seems there is nothing left to do, but do it all again. This prospect does not sound satisfying. Where do you go from here?

Coming back to my point about blogs, it’s in this way I once felt the structure of the internet (short sentences, listacles, regurgitated information, links from tree to tree) was killing our ability to stay on course, to learn, to get smarter and more creative.

The quick information on the Internet seemed to hinder our ability to understand something new at a level of depth in the brain so as to allow that knowledge to impact our creativity, to shape our perspective, so something new and original might come out of us on our path towards heart’s desire. Rewriting content, cliffs notes on complex ideas, the farce of learning fast what takes years to comprehend…all dangers of the blog and Buzzfeed inundated Internet landscape.

But of course, my hatred for short content was very biased.

I’m a long format writer with a particular distaste for editing. If I had to make my points short, that meant I had to work harder to be more succinct. Of course, spinning and shaping a complex idea over paragraphs and chapters and entire novels is important, so important. But so is piquing interest, simplifying complexity, and giving short snippets to entice readers along. To inspire. To introduce. To easily share.

Not to mention, when I google the answer to my life’s toughest questions (like: “Can you get salmonella from raw chicken on an open wound?” And: “How to cut a pineapple”) I almost always click the link that promises to tell me answers in a defined number of easy-to-read steps. I don’t seek out some grad student’s 40-page thesis to get my shit fixed quick.

My blogs-are-ruinous-to-intelligence idea and my internet usage patterns proved to be quite hypocritical. Ugh. Time to reassess.

Writing and blogging, for me, are two very different things. Both important.

It appears, in the Internet age as an Internet writer, I cannot have one without the other.

I’ve been writing my whole life. I’m still trying to figure out how to blog. Kudos to those of you who were born bloggers, aka copywriters. It’s a lesson in editing I’m slowly learning (with amazing help from blogs like this).

It’s true that long content is absolutely necessary to get my points across. It’s also true that no one is going to read my work if I can’t entice them with numbered lists and sharable content. The Internet is my platform. I have to play along.

I have begun to create shiny dazzling tree biospheres to catch the attention of my readers (this is my blog) to lead them to a longer, more time-consuming philosophical and experiential path out of the distractions (this is my online book and Portland, Oregon business). If you’re curious to see the work in progress, my mash-up blog/book exists now at insightinflux.com. Please, let me know what you think.

Blogging vs. Writing — Lesson Learned?

Entertainment and ease are requirements of this age. This is neither good nor bad, it’s just true. Blogging and writing are BFF. At least for my purposes, it’s necessary for both to work together to teach, encourage, and share. Here’s to figuring out the magic formula. Won’t you join me?