A Day in the Life of a Blogger Who Loves Paper
Regine Debatty
Régine Debatty, The Office Collar worn in the picture was designed by Simone Brewster
Whatever my plans for the future were four years ago, they’ve failed miserably. I never wanted to be a blogger. I thought (we) blogs were for broken-hearted teenagers to share their angst with their classmates. Come to think of it I never wanted to work in the contemporary art world either.
I started writing a blog in early 2004, by chance and by lack of any meaningful activity to keep me busy at the office. The blog was something like a dumpster, a place where I would throw every bit of information I could find about a theme I knew very little about at the time: the way artists, architects and designers engage with technology in their practice. As bad a start as it was, it nevertheless didn’t take long before I realized that I had the fever. Today, not only do I eat, breathe and love art but I wouldn’t want to define myself in any other way than blogger.
Blogs and magazines are like salt and pepper, they sit side by side on the table but they have a different taste and they fulfill a different role
Yet, it’s still paper I worship. Maybe part of the reason for that is that I’m already too old to get used to reading fluvial essays on a luminous screen. But I also love listening to the sound of the pages as I turn them hastily, I love scribbling notes in margins, marking corners, I like archiving magazines by colour and I like the clean fresh space they leave in my apartment when I finally decide to throw the whole lot away, I like creative typography, beautiful images spread on two pages, I like touching the surface of the paper and smelling a new issue as I open it. And best of all I can kill mosquitoes with magazines.
You can do that with a laptop too of course but that wouldn’t be very smart, would it? All of the above might not sound like praiseworthy behaviour for someone who claims to be a true worshipper but, I nevertheless profess an utmost and undying respect for paper. After all, trees have been cut down for it. I must admit though, that any eco-conscious consideration which so far enabled the most wifi’ed and networked among us to promulgate the green superiority of all things virtual and on screen, over paper is getting weaker by the day.
The year 2006 closed with a somewhat stunning number: a rough calculation comparing the impact of humans and Second Life avatars showed that the average Second Life avatar consumes about as much electricity as your average Brazilian. More recently, a study revealed that the world’s data centers are expected to outmatch the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020. It appears that, as years pass, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold.
As it happens, I also write for magazines and over the years I got to measure the trench that separates paper from pixels. It starts with the little things that make your existence easier. For example, I can’t count the number of times I have arrived at the press accreditation desk of a major art event, presented myself as the editor of the we-make-money-not-art blog to be looked upon with utter compassion because, «sorry Madam, bloggers, don’t count as press, so you should queue over there, like the other visitors, thank you very much Madam». Only then would I unleash Plan B and casually mention that I also have a column in this posh British art magazine and, abracadabra, the red carpet treatment. That’s the way it goes these days, no matter the quantity and quality of the audience who reads you on one medium or another.
More importantly writing for the printed page comes with a very different rhythm. I used to cherish the immediacy of the blogs, the possibility to publish on the fly. This can’t happen with magazines, I visit an exhibition and my review will only be printed three months after. I have had to learn to rely on more than the sheer joy of freshness, to take my time, adopt a more poised pace and deploy strategies that will make reading about an exhibition that closed one month ago still worth everyone’s precious time. On the other hand, I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the fact that paper won’t allow me to hyperlink directly to the websites of artists, new terms or events. I keep reading that technology, which will allow us to do just that will soon be part and parcel of our daily life (and outside of Tokyo), but I’m impatient. I can’t wait to see the day when I’ll be able to click on a paper magazine to check-out how Wikipedia defines the obscure art terms that journalists keep throwing at my ignorance.
Probably the most priceless lesson that blogs have given me is that being personal and laid-back doesn’t have to be a heresy. Actually, when some editor asks me to write a column for a magazine, a chapter for a book, or a text for a catalog, that’s always what they request: the intimate, spontaneous and personal voice they hear on my blog. What they ask for is the point of view of the blogger, who also happens to be an expert in the field. Or maybe it’s the other way round. Paper and pixels have more in common than meets the eye. Gone are the days when academics, journalists and critics would dismiss the reliability of blogs (although I’ve recently had some dire surprises). Yes, there are some bloggers who are indeed inaccurate, ill-mannered and unscrupulous. But we all know of journalists who are paid by what the English call the “gutter press” to be just as unprofessional.
Most widely-read bloggers are conscientious, be precise and incisive. They have to be. There is something similar to peer review that ensures a blogger will do his or her job properly. It’s called comments. If you write something even slightly fallacious, there will always be a better-informed reader out there who will be ready and sometimes even delighted to correct you. Actually there is something comforting in the knowledge that you can update an entry at any time, I can see the story you’ve posted on the blog and say «I have the power to rebuild you». Besides, you can feed your readers with generous helpings of lies every single morning if you want. Technically, there’s nothing in the administration system of a blogging platform that will prevent you from publishing untruths but readers are no fools either, if they find a lack of respect for veracity or some half-cooked thinking on your posts, they will just stop visiting your blog. And without readers, a blogger is little more than a vox clamans in deserto, an unsold stack of magazines at the newsagent. Like many people and like some of my fellow bloggers, I don’t believe that blogs could ever replace magazines but I can’t live with only paper glossies either. They are not sufficient anymore. Blogs and magazines are like salt and pepper, they sit side by side on the table but they have a different taste and they fulfill a different role. Now, if only the ladies from the press accreditation office would realize that.
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Régine Debatty. Portugal
Régine Debatty writes about the intersection between art, design and technology on her blog we-make-money-not-art, as well as in various design and art magazines. She also curates art shows and lectures internationally about the way artists, hackers and interaction designers (mis)use technology.
