"Hey, Diddle, Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle!" illustration by Arthur Rackham from "The Nursery Rhymes of Mother Goose" (Frontispiece, St. Nicholas, October 1913).
"The blog generates a drawing sensation. Every day it's empty again and needs to be fed," writes Amba of AmbivaBlog, in her post "Looking for Bloggons":
Instead of the blog's being a welcome place to put the thoughts we have, our blogs drive us to go in search of thoughts to have.
This is particularly apparent on a slow inner news day, one of those fallow, bovine, cud-chewing days when we really don't have much of anything to say (if only because we just blurted out some huge, consummate, climactic thing yesterday) and would rather just stand there vacantly, switching our tails, or run around and work up a brainless sweat.
Partly it's a sort of provider feeling, like you've got to go out hunting every day to feed your family. Your pod is waiting, with sparkling-eyed anticipation.
It's another manifestation of the relentless search for honor among our peers, as articulated by Dr. Peter F. Rowbotham in his 1992 essay "The Importance of Being Noticed," referenced here early and often. Rowbotham argued that expressive activities -- read blogging -- are "a solution to a basic problem embedded in human nature, the problem of reconciling self-interest with the conflicting interests of others":
We advance individual interests by acquiring Geltung [worthiness, respect, prestige, standing, importance and validity], fundamentally because it increases our inclusive biological fitness, and more generally because it brings pleasurable rewards.
Are we getting into crackpot theory territory here, "a thesis that explains virtually all of our everyday experience in one shot," as reader Mark Wallace once wrote? It works for us and neatly explains the blogger's compulsion to stop standing there "vacantly, switching our tails" and jump over that old devil moon one more time.
Update: "I believe we are reverting back to our Stone Age tribal natures," writes Amba in an update to her original post:
Wow, whatta post! It explains WHY the gratifications of blogging -- complex, yet immediate and non-deferred -- are so much puzzlingly (and perilously) greater than those of other, more official and remunerative activities.
Like a tribal storyteller, we get immediate laughs and hoots and slaps on the back from people whose response we trust because, well, because we know them; they're our pod.
Traffic stats like Ann's [Althouse, whose post on blogging guilt inspired Amba's post] are gravy; they correspond to the reputation of an especially good storyteller or trustworthy news source spreading beyond the immediate campfire to the whole region. But that's secondary. What keeps us going is the immediate esteem of our peers. Oh, and let's not forget the extra jolt of juice we get from being recognized/ linked to by our role models! Thanks, Ann and Sissy!
Talk about extra jolts of juice, there's nothing like "Wow, whatta post!" to get the juices flowing. Thanks to you, Amba!
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