On Blogs, Performance, and Having an Audience

"Social media - it’s just the market’s answer to a generation that demanded to perform so the market said, here - perform. Perform everything to each other, all the time for no reason. It’s prison - its horrific. It's performer and audience melded together. What do we want more than to lie in our bed at the end of the day and just watch our life as a satisfied audience member. I know very little about anything. But what I do know is that if you can live your life without an audience, you should do it." ~Bo Burnham, Make Happy

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I don't know if I agree with all of this quote, but it sure has stuck with me for something from a Netflix comedy special.

Let me be completely honest here: I have tried to build a website like half a dozen times. And this is the only one I've ever actually published, let alone paid for and registered a domain. Why now, you may ask. Was it to build my voice teaching business in a virtual post-Covid world? Was it to present myself to potential social media and marketing employers? Was it because college said I had to? All of those things are true, but the real reason I sat down last week to build a website was this. This blog. This stupid extra page thrown in to an ostensibly professional website. Because I had a bunch of thoughts about a book I had just read, and I wanted a place to write those thoughts down. I know, that's a REALLY dumb reason to build a website. But here we are. And here YOU are, pretend reader, on my website and reading my thoughts. So it's all worth it.

Except....I doubt anyone is actually going to read this. And I don't even know if I want people to. Like, it's not about them. I just wanted to say things into the gaping void of the internet. Because what's the point of having Thoughts™ if you're not at least going to put them out there? To perform those thoughts. But at the same time, I didn't necessarily want to have a conversation about it. I didn't want to join the discourse. That's why I didn't post that to the Beautifully Foolish Endeavor subreddit, or to my facebook page, or wherever. Because I just wanted the thoughts to exist outside of my own head, where they were too loud and echoey.

So why go through the effort of making an entire website when you could have just made a shitty Wordpress blog and called it a day? That's a very good question, person who is not actually reading this. It's because I DO want to perform. Literally and figuratively. I am an actual performer, like, professionally. So that's part of it. But also, I love the idea of people Engaging with my Thoughts. When I post, like, actual statuses or whatever on Facebook, I want the likes. I want to know that someone read the thing and they were affected enough to click a little thumb. I don't necessarily even want comments or actual engagement, just the "yeah I read it" notifications. Hell, just typing that sentence made me want to link this blog post TO my facebook page, thus completing the Performative Internet Expression ouroboros (which I've decided to abbreviate as the PIE-O, obviously).

And I think there's more ("No!" you say incredulously). When I was a teenager, I tweeted a philosophical question every day. Not because I actually wanted to engage with those questions (necessarily, some I did). But because I wanted people to see that I was, once again, Having Thoughts. I wanted to be someone who had interesting things to say, and that people would go to for said interesting things. Spoilers: I was not. Which, like, whatever, you know? And I mostly got over that need to perform my own Deep™ness. I say, writing a rambling blog post about performing my own thoughts. I think we all want to be seen a certain way, and it never actually goes away. Or maybe I hope that's true, 'cause then I'm not the annoying weird guy. Again.

Well this went off the rails. And never even found a point! It's a good thing nobody's gonna read it, right? Right?