Blogging Is Dead

I want to read fiction again. I miss the dank and musty smell of secondhand books, the yellowing and crumbling pages as I turn them. I miss the high of a good climax and the winding down of a rational denouement. Mostly, I miss being intelligent. Since I stopped reading voraciously (I used to consume five books a week) I believe that I’ve dumbed down. Too much Internet does that.

I stopped reading fiction because I thought that reading blogs can take the place of my books. For a while reading blogs satisfied my craving for good stories—someone would talk about a funny incident that happened on the way to work or an epiphany about life, and I’d be hooked. Blogging had a charm, back then. People did it to share their stories because they would burst if they didn’t, or at the very least, it gave them satisfaction to know that their story is out there somewhere and someone might read it sometime. Blogging was all about honesty three, five years ago. Now? It’s just another way to sell.

The way I see it, the trend in Philippine blogging today is marketing. The more popular bloggers not only market products, services, and events but themselves as well. You can see it in the way they praise themselves and each other, as if kissing ass is the only way to go. You want to be popular, Blair Waldorf said, you have to decide that it’s all worth it. A lot of bloggers have decided that it’s all worth it—being used, practically for free, by companies for their marketing stunts and whoring their blogs and themselves excessively just to be invited to events where they can be used by companies for their marketing stunts. The irony is present but ignored. I think that enough bloggers have done this to ruin other bloggers’ credibility.

Some may argue that blogging is actually on the rise. More and more companies and organizations realize the impact of this relatively new medium on the areas of marketing, advertising, politics, journalism, and even art. Bloggers are invited to more events and product launchings as if they are now acknowledged as legitimate journalists.This is cool, but the honesty of, say, a glowing restaurant review is tarnished. Blog posts used to be distinguished from magazine and newspaper articles because they were spontaneous and shared the author’s actual experience with a product or service because he or she got curious and tried it. Now bloggers are invited to try stuff and are expected to blog positively about it. Not everyone does, but there’s an existing majority. If I wanted this sort of thing, I would just read magazines and newspapers where the authors are at least experienced and established in their fields.

I am not trying to impose any semblance of ethics on the Philippine blogging community. I am not telling anyone to stop doing these things and to just go back to the good ol’ days when blogging was pristine and politics-free.All I’m saying is this: the content of Philippine blogs has degenerated. Therefore, I will go back to my books, where at least I know my brain will not just spontaneously combust from excessive vacuity.

Blogging is dead to me.