Picking apart other people’s blogs has always been one of the public’s favorite pastimes. A blog is a place to vent, sort out your feelings, and make peace with yourself—or so one camp says. No, another camp insists: a blog should provide useful information, not emotional outbursts. It is a place to record the small details of a life that has nothing to do with anyone else—or perhaps it is not a diary at all, and should show readers what you are thinking only insofar as they can find some intellectual or emotional resonance in it.
People can argue about this endlessly because we still have not absorbed a very simple principle: there is no first place in literature, while in martial arts there is always a second place. In other words, writing cannot be ranked as cleanly as a competition. It sounds obvious, yet it has a remarkable ability to pull people into endless disputes, and not only when the subject is blogging.
I once reposted a discussion from Japan about how otaku might “survive” socially. The argument was addressed to otaku looking for partners: instead of searching for someone who understands and shares your interests, perhaps you should look for someone who can watch you do something bizarre, confirm that it is not harming the family, say in an indifferent tone, “Yes, yes, you’re having one of your episodes again,” and then ignore you. That, the argument claimed, would make you happier.
I do not agree. How could an otaku not want attention? Many of them became otaku precisely because they wanted other people’s attention too badly, were repeatedly disappointed, and eventually turned the identity into a form of self-protection.
Wanting to be noticed is perfectly normal. The trouble begins when people decide that there is only one acceptable way to ask for attention. We can film animals’ daily lives and biological needs in extraordinary detail. From their behavior, we infer which one is ready to mate or which one is trying to seize the dominant position; then we use those conclusions to explain the behavior again. But when it comes to people, we refuse to tolerate actions that cannot be neatly standardized.
Suppose I write a love poem to express my feelings. If the emotion is hidden too deeply in the language, people complain that the poem has “no value” because it has failed to deliver the proper value to its readers. Suppose I make a supposedly universal list of the best hot-pot restaurants. Several of those restaurants may simply be places I personally enjoy, and then people complain that the list has “no value” because I have not considered everyone else’s tolerance for hot pot—or even the possibility that its high purine content may contribute to gout.
So perhaps I write about my understanding of love instead: its bitterness, sweetness, stickiness like sex, and thinness like tears. That too can be condemned as worthless. It is only your version of love, people will say. Nobody cares about your emotions. Nobody is interested in what you feel.
Who decided that these standards were necessary? If you trace things back far enough, you can usually find an answer. But if the person who established the standard is the leader of a tightly bonded group, can that standard really be questioned? Can it be rejected without threatening the group itself?
This brings us back to the supposed “value” of a blog. Look at the shared beliefs that circulate in blogging communities and you will find the same word again and again: value. What value can you provide to other people in exchange for their traffic?
You may have a large audience, but if all you do is record your days, express your moods, and talk about your feelings, that is often not considered value. It is not “useful” enough for the traffic coming your way. Meanwhile, someone with very little traffic may produce writing that makes readers nod along repeatedly. Why not give that person some of the traffic too? And who exactly is supposed to hand it over?
That is where alliances form. Once people gather together, they begin to establish a public standard of value: unified internally and presented outwardly as if it were self-evident. When there are too many individuals involved, proving your own values is difficult. Rejecting someone else’s existence becomes a much easier way to prove that your own values are correct.
But when standards conflict, how do we decide who is right? Eventually, everyone returns to the one standard that most people recognize: traffic.
You have the traffic, but your writing has no value. So I will gather together everyone who does have value, and we will prove ourselves collectively. Then the traffic rankings will show that justice has prevailed.
Someone may object: if these people have already formed a group, why do they still need to prove that their ideas are correct? Because they cannot prove it by themselves. At the center of self-justification is the desire to demonstrate to the outside world that your understanding is right and your persistence was not mistaken.
There is nothing wrong with standing by your own convictions. But why must another person be recruited to prove that those convictions are valid? Because traffic quietly ranks blogs. That ranking becomes a crude, binary judgment: my traffic is higher than yours, therefore more people like me, therefore I must be right.
Then the people with lower traffic but a high opinion of their own work step forward. They accuse the popular writers of producing empty material merely to chase numbers. Blogs, they say, should create genuinely good things. And so they form their own alliances.
What happens if we discard that standard as well? What if writing a blog does not require traffic and does not need to demonstrate value? You can write tutorials, diaries, complaints, reflections, book notes, film records, accounts of sexual experiences, or an extended “fuck you, who the hell do you think you are to tell me what to write?” All of it is allowed.
But then what is the point of writing a blog?
The question seems to circle back to where it started. Why do we insist on asking what someone else is trying to achieve by blogging? Perhaps their reason is extremely simple, but does not match our grand, romantic, slightly proud image of what blogging ought to be. Perhaps it does not give us the motivation to keep writing, wait for traffic, and eventually see our work recognized. Does that make their writing meaningless?
The essential point is that there is no first place in writing and no second place in martial arts. If I like you, then even if you write a pile of shit, I can still feel the charm of that particular pile of shit. Isn’t that enough?
Of course, blogging eventually runs into traffic again. There is nothing wrong with adapting to the market, but you must be prepared to sacrifice a great deal of yourself for it. There is also nothing wrong with insisting on your own voice, but then stop staring at the market until you have twisted yourself into something incoherent.
And then there are people who do not care how much traffic they receive and do not care whether anyone considers their work valuable. I would call them, affectionately, not entirely right in the head.
After all, who writes a real blog like a normal person? Normal people have already been spun around and around by traffic and value.
Normal person: Is everything you write just shit?
Unreasonable person: I don’t give a shit.
Normal person: Your writing is shit!
Unreasonable person: I don’t give a shit.