Blogging Is Turning Me into an Attention Whore
Blogging can be a frustrating experience.
As a blogger, you want readers. What’s the point, otherwise? A blog without readers might as well be a private journal — no reason to pay the web hosting fee.
Of course, my blog does have some readers. I’m getting about 500 visitors per month right now. (Yes, I know — you’re impressed.) If I put up Google ads, I might have a few additional cents in my pocket by year end.
My readership is composed almost entirely of my friends. (Hey, guys! I like you. We should hang out more. But you’re an awfully quiet bunch.) I talk to people and hear they’ve read my stuff, but I don’t get much direct feedback.
I can’t say I’m that surprised. Most people browse the internet as consumers: They read headlines, skim articles, and click furiously from one site to another. They treat the web like a library and websites like books — well, books they toss aside after a minute or two.
And I’m no different. I’ve also been like this for most of my tenure on the web: Read, read, click, click, check e-mail, read, click.
I actually began as a contributor, though. In high school, I was part of a few game-related communities. I helped run a modestly popular website — which actually still exists, go figure — wrote some tutorials, participated in forums, and so on.
But once I started college, I reverted to consumption mode. I had less free time and felt less of a connection to my communities. I stopped contributing to them.
Now, nine years later, I’m transitioning back to the contributor role. It’s a strange feeling — like walking into a library and realizing you can have conversations with the books. Weird. But that’s the beauty of the internet: It’s great for information dissemination, but it’s best for interaction and community building. And I’m not just talking about e-mail and Facebook.
But now to my main point. As a blogger, I’m starting to notice something:
It takes a lot to grab people’s attention.
There’s so much to sift through on the web, and most of it is pretty pedestrian. Internet attention spans are short. People want a quick fix, something that will entertain or help them in just a few minutes.
As a blogger, I’m competing for your attention. I’m not used to that. I’ve always tried to avoid being the center of attention. It’s just not something I’ve liked.
But I can feel a change welling in me. When you write stuff and put it on the internet, you want people to read it. And if you’re not getting much attention, you start to crave it. It becomes an obsession.
That’s why so many bloggers are fixated on their “stats” — visitor numbers provided by services like Google Analytics. Their hearts flutter with every increase in traffic and shudder with every decrease. They shriek with glee when their posts reach the front page of sites like Digg.
I’m becoming an attention whore just like the rest of them. Or maybe I’m just an attention whore wannabe or an attention whore in training. There are worse things you could be, right?
Okay, maybe not.
But that’s the way it is. I’m not so unhappy: It’s fun to enter this new role — competing for people’s attention — and see what I can make of it. I’ve done so little competing for attention so far in my life that everything is new and exciting.
And there are other benefits to blogging.
For one, it’s making me much less self-conscious. If you’re a private person — which I was much more so a year ago — you tend to think people will react strongly to what you say. You’re worried about making a bad impression. You think that if you don’t watch yourself you’ll screw up and put up something embarrassing for all to see. Everyone who searches for your name will think less of you.
I’ve realized these thoughts are delusions. Sure, you’ll always find the odd story of someone who gets screwed over — the corporate boss who sees drunk images of some kid on Facebook and decides not to hire him — but these are the exception. In general, people don’t care as much as you think they will. Your private life is a bigger deal to you than it is to them. It takes a lot more to grab their attention than you might think.
For me, this knowledge is freeing. It means I don’t need to heavily edit or censor myself. I don’t have to stress out about the far-reaching implications of everything I say. If I say something I think is idiotic ten years from now, fine. I’ll just have to deal with it. The only alternative is to say nothing at all or to water myself down so much that no one cares what I have to say, anyway.
There’s a tendency for bloggers to become provocative just for the sake of being provocative: to oversell in their headlines, reveal so much about their personal lives you wish they’d held back a little, or just say “fuck” a lot. I’m trying to avoid that. But you have it admit it’s pretty fucking tempting!
I suspect that it’ll be mostly other bloggers who can relate to this post. (My friend Kim, in fact, has written a similar post recently.) As with anything, it’s hard to understand what it’s like to be a blogger if you aren’t one.
And that’s fine. Bloggers are more likely to leave comments, anyway 
no kidding. the only thing that sucks about having our friends comprise our readership is that our friends don’t comment. strangers are much better at making me feel loved. and hey, it feels good to not be writing to an abyss. i’m starting to get more bloggy-types reading my blog and they are leaving comments. i am starting to think that you need to get in with the right circles when it comes to blogging. you can’t just write.
kim
28 Sep 09 at 11:30 am
Waleed Abdulla of Networked Blogs, another fbFund team, has an awesome slogan (and tshirts to go with it!) “On average, your blog sucks”. And I would say most people with a blog would tend to agree.
I personally think blogs as a product/interface/trend are horrible places for someone to feel smart about themselves and then slowly fade away as no one is listening.
I would also say ‘not getting attention’ is an artifact of the bad platforms which are wordpress, moveable type and so on. The facebook ‘like’ and one-click commenting take away the simple simple boundaries to being a ‘contributor.’
Another problem is that the consumers of the ‘comments’ are YOUR readers, not mine. Until you reach some critical scale, everything is about YOU and the people YOU can attract to a blog. So, when I write a comment, my goals are to 1. Make YOU feel good for having comments on your blog, 2. Enter some intellectual discourse WITH YOU 3. HOPE that other readers of your blog think what I have to say is interesting.
All these issues apply to ‘small’ blogs. Huge topic-centered or celebrity blogs have a dedicated enough following that these really aren’t issues. But maybe you don’t become a celebrity through a blog, maybe you have a blog when you become a celebrity.
How do you become a celebrity or atleast a micro-celebrity? As you say… by being remarkable. How do you do that? I don’t think it happens through a blog. But by doing something more risky. Something that you can’t do by yourself in a cafe.
Chris Turitzin
28 Sep 09 at 11:53 am
Whoa, Chris, lots of thoughts to respond to here:
I agree with “On average, your blog sucks” — but I’d also agree with “On average, your [anything] sucks.” It’s just a fact that most of what we’re exposed to isn’t that interesting (to us, at least).
I think you are far too negative about blogs. In part that may be because you haven’t found ones that you like (though I could be wrong about that). I suspect that if you look around you’ll find blogs you do like in niches you find interesting.
People write blogs for the same reason they write anything — to connect with other people. There’s nothing special or cursed about the blog format.
I agree that comments help out the author of the blog more than they help the commenter, at least in the short-term. But as I said, the idea is to create a connection. If you don’t want to connect with a blog author, I wouldn’t expect you to post a blog comment.
On the topic of being remarkable and doing risky stuff — yes, I agree, people care about what you’re doing if it’s remarkable. A blog is a communication medium. No one knows about what you’re doing if you don’t tell them.
So I’m not really sure what your problem is with blogs in particular.
miketuritzin
28 Sep 09 at 12:26 pm
Yup, I agree with you, Kim. It’s really important to reach out, find a community you click with, and become an active part of it. I’m in the beginning stages of doing just that, but I have a ways to go.
miketuritzin
28 Sep 09 at 3:59 pm
i also agree with your follow up “your (anything) sucks.” i was hesitant to start a blog at first as i thought it would be pointless. i spent many hours on each of my first posts, trying to create something that had more than a disposable value – autobiographical essays with a twist at the end. it is not possible to keep that up along with my other writing, and it seems that people prefer new content versus good but sporadic content. but anyway, you are right – it is just like anything else. you could easily assume that your friends’ music sucks, that their writing sucks, etc. and many things we love started out sucking.
a separate note – plenty of people achieve some sort of celebrity through blogging. not that that should be one’s goal, but look at diablo cody – her blogging was the beginning of a short path to an oscar for writing Juno. i also see many blogs with thousands of “followers” and hundreds of comments per post. and i see bloggers getting book deals all of the time. so the idea of becoming famous first is completely moot.
i never read blogs until i started blogging. i was under the impression that they were lame. but it turns out, i get a variety of different things from people’s blogs. some people have lives that are very different from mine, so their posts about their daily activities are inherently interesting. it is a good way to stay in touch with friends you never see. some people post tutorials or things that have value to another person. other people post articles on social issues that are at least as interesting as ones in big newspapers/magazines.
i suppose if you were to write for a newspaper you would not expect comments. you would assume that X number of people had read it and be done with it. it is a job. but with blogging, it is a strange thing to put your experiences out there onto the web and find out that in fact everyone is reading (i’m going to guess if they are faithfully reading, they don’t think the blog sucks), everyone knows what happened to you, but it’s a one-way conversation to all of your friends, all at once. i would never have expected to care for comments, but if a blog is a tool to convey something personal, then there is a psychological benefit to receiving some so that the conversation feels “two-way.”
as for blog comments in general – i know some people think they are generally useless for society, but i’ve noticed that readers do pay attention to comments and that they can launch interesting debate. not all blog comments are just for the benefit of making someone feel good about their blog.
Kim
30 Sep 09 at 10:20 am
Well you can always get naked and skip around to feel more or less adequate. Way to go Mikey. Balls to the wall.
burke
1 Oct 09 at 11:11 am
i don’t always read your posts, but i read this one cuz it had the word “whore” in the title
brett
1 Oct 09 at 10:50 pm
On the one hand, it is true that, if I have thoughts on a given subject, they can likely be summed up by one word: “like.” And if I dislike, well, then it is best to not say anything at all, as the adage goes. However, Mike, I get the sense that as a writer you might like people, even your friends, to enter into some intellectual discourse with YOU, and really, who has time for that? We must find the correct interface for such a thing; I’m sure facebook will lead the way.
Sorry I’m a crotchety grad student. Also, I have an averagely-sucky blog which only my friends read, though for me that means I get 10 visitors a month, if I’m lucky. In fact, recently Allison accused me of having a secret blog, evidently forgetting that I had just sent her a link to a recent post that I thought she would be particularly interested in.
Anyway, I’ve also been on the other side of this media circus working for KQED’s famous, ergo remarkable, Michael Krasny. Among other things, I answered telephones and screened emails, listening to people communicate to us their thoughts on the economy, or the war, or media bias, usually in a somewhat ranting form. And by ‘us’ and I mean ‘me.’ When media gets that big, it’s usually not the most authentic or worthwhile place to have an actual discussion anyway.
am
5 Oct 09 at 12:52 am
Hey Ameeth — agree with you that a blog isn’t usually a good forum for intellectual discourse. Besides the fact that blog comments are a weird format, most people prefer to talk about things rather than write about them.
But anyway, blogs are a successful medium — and are becoming more successful by the year — so I think the question is what angle you (I) should approach blogging from (and not whether blogs are worthwhile in the first place). Blogs are a “lighter” medium than, say, books, and you need to account for that.
miketuritzin
5 Oct 09 at 10:28 am
Hi Mike,
I’m some random girl from Canada passing the time in a library. I took maybe the last hour to read every post until this point and thought this was an appropriate place to leave a comment. It’s several months past so who knows if you’ll ever read it but I have an hour until my meeting starts so if you do not then it isn’t a waste of my time.
I just wanted to say that I find your blog very interesting. I found it while I was playing the click-game (where you click on the most interesting page and follow it for as long as possible). I started on Facebook and didn’t get very far.
Your writing is amusing! I was so interested to read about your week helping people and the hippy that encouraged you. I related to your essay about outsiderness and can also sort of trace the roots of my own lonerity to changing schools and moving frequently. I always just assumed it was part of my personality…
I was really impressed by your research into eating cheaply but healthily. It fleetingly inspired me to eat a decent meal tonight. I’ll probably do it too!
Thanks again for sharing your consciousness with the world. Hour well spent on my part.
Jenwa
8 Jan 10 at 10:01 am
I agree with Mike. Most of the blogging and networking sites are all about attention seeking.
pankaj
12 Feb 10 at 10:26 pm
When there are so many pretty Russian girls in the world its hard to have time for blogs.
I’m with Brett, i read this because it had whore in the title
Daren
23 Feb 10 at 3:25 pm
Hey Mike,
Good call, I think it’s tough as a reader not to want to move from place to place quickly. While surfing, in the back of my mind there’s this nagging feeling – what’s the NEXT thing I can move to? I usually lose interest in what I’m reading the second I make it to the page. It’s not like it’s difficult to move your mouse up to your next bookmark and click.
I’m working on it though, I’m slowly cutting back on the amount that I take in. It’s tough, though with all the quick references that blogging allows. I mean anything with a link in it seems to just be begging to be clicked, therefore diverting the attention of the reader from your message. I tend to be worn out after clicking a link and reading through it to have to come all the way back to the original article and finish it (after I forget what it was about).
Ah well, I guess that’s just how it goes. I found a link to you on the art of non conformity (in the comments) and must say that I like your writing. I’ll be coming back here.
Mark D
Mark Dowdell
4 Mar 10 at 2:59 pm
Hey, thanks, Mark. Glad you like the site.
miketuritzin
4 Mar 10 at 3:25 pm