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Is blogging innately narcissistic?

The attitude seems to be that personal, confessional blogging ('female' blogging) is narcissistic, and authority blogging ('male' blogging) is not.

Personal blogging takes the blogger's own life and turns it into narrative. Stories.

Authority blogging establishes the blogger as an 'authority' in some particular niche, and relates information that (theoretically) solves a problem the reader might have or teaches something that the reader wants to know. An authority blogger usually has a product or service to sell you.

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To gather an audience as either kind of blogger, you have to offer value. You have to entertain or provoke or divert or enlighten. Readers don't care about you; they care about themselves, and what you can do for them. Blogging is also interactive and conversational in a way that 'regular' writing is not. The comments section becomes an extension of the piece itself. I find that, more than in other types of writing, whether you're writing as an 'authority' or from a personal point of view, blogging forces you to write for readers first and foremost -- or else you won't have any.

A word that often gets kicked around when discussing bad writing is self-indulgent. But ask someone what they mean when they say "so-and-so's piece is self-indulgent" and chances are they'll look at you vaguely. Self-indulgent writing is like art: you know it when you see it. It is -- and this is my own attempt to define it -- writing that doesn't offer value to anyone except the writer. It doesn't exist except to reflect back on itself. That, to me, is the essence of narcissistic writing -- writing that, like a narcissist himself, is void at the core.

If writing stands the test of time, if generations of people continue to find meaning in it, then it can't be narcissistic (even if the writer actually is a narcissist). But the more 'confessional' kind of writing has always gotten a bad rap -- it's somehow not as important or intellectually rigorous as other types of writing. It's as if the writer is somehow cheating by mining her own life for material and then failing to transmute or disguise that material in some non-autobiographical form.

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I was thinking about this because I'm reading Daniel Pink's A WHOLE NEW MIND, in which he describes our culture's transition from the Information Age (when logical, analytical, left-brain thinking ruled the day) to the Conceptual Age (when logical, analytic left-brain work will be outsourced or done by computers). To truly thrive in the Conceptual Age, you need to provide what computers and low-wage workers in India or China cannot, and what people in this age of material abundance will still find interesting, relevant or meaningful.

You need to engage in work that is high concept and high touch.

"High concept involves the ability to create artistic and emotional beauty, to detect patterns and opportunities, to craft a satisfying narrative and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into a novel invention. High touch involves the ability to empathize, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one's self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian, in pursuit of purpose and meaning."


He dedicates a whole chapter to the importance of Story: "where high concept and high touch intersect."

Because in a world where anyone can look up any fact on the Internet, factual information itself becomes less valuable.

"What begins to matter more is the ability to place these facts in context and to deliver them with emotional impact."*

In his book THINGS THAT MAKE US SMART, Don Norman writes:

"Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalize, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture the emotions...Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge, context, and emotion."

So I can't help wondering if this bias against confessional storytelling is a remnant from our left-brain-ruled Information Age that prized fact over anecdote. And that the tremendous rise in blogging since 2004 or so (when blogging became so easy that non-geeks could do it) doesn't correlate to a rise in general narcissism, but something else. "Meaning," says Pink, "is the new money." The act of writing anything -- no matter how badly or well -- is an act of meaning, searching for it in the way you organize and analyze your experiences, weaving it out of the randomness of your life. By sharing it with others and seeing their reactions, you place your own personal experience within a broader context. You become part of a bigger conversation. I think we're all hungry for that, however that hunger -- for high-concept, high-touch -- might choose to express itself.

What do you think?






* If you want to change the way people think and act, you have to reach them on an emotional as well as intellectual level. Facts alone can't motivate change. Otherwise we'd all be fit, healthy, organized, happy people eating our veggies and flossing every night.