The third installment in Aaron Darc's adventures into cyberspace (the first two are located  at the bottom of the Social page). How did  I return to Netland after the disillusionment of Dan_81? And how the hell did you end up here? The social phenomenon of blogging, and the reality TV show that was too bad to resist.

  

 

 

Of course, there’s one final piece missing to the jigsaw puzzle of my relatively short life in cyberspace. You are, after all, here. How did I get here? And why? Why does someone who found nothing but trouble and disappointment in cyberspace – from the strange, mindless chit-chat of the forums, to the more interactive tragedies of Dan_81 & Co – now spend part of every day there, in his very own website?

I’m one of those people who understand the difference between a medium and the existing products of that medium. You can’t blame cyberspace just because it’s mostly full of crap – many of the people who put out some great stuff on the internet no doubt do so because of the simple logic that nobody else is providing what they want to read, and the belief that they have a voice unique enough to counter-act that crap. I can’t say I ever found much to celebrate in cyberspace, but at the end of the day (putting more "milenial" forms of interaction, like the chatrooms, aside), there’s still the good old fashioned website – and hey, if it isn’t out there yet, all the better. It’s the chat-rooms, and the extreme usages of cyberspace (and Youtube, of course) that grab the headlines and become the topic of most conversations regarding cyberspace (the idea of "existing" in cyberspace, as opposed to simply netsurfing electronic versions of written material). But the old-fashioned website has blossomed, also, and the latest cyber-craze surely worth exploring (even if for more anthropological reasons) is The Blog. Undoubtedly, Youtube has recently stolen The Blog’s thunder; but before Youtube, there was Myspace, and not only is it still a revolution du jour, many believe it will ultimately outlive Youtube (which with particular thanks to impending copyright problems, is seen to be a fad that will come to pass). The cyber-generation, with the isolation of adolescence now increasingly exasperated, long to be known. They long to be realised, and felt, and to be connected to. The Blog is far more than the striving for 15 minutes. Warhol’s cliché sells Mankind’s lust for fame far short.  We’re laying ourseves bare, putting every thought we have on the line, in the desparate hope that our lives will find the lives of others, and we will therefore be known. Fame is the most intense intimacy; it is longed for by people who feel so starved of connection, they are consumed by obtaining the greatest hit. That’s what most of those Big Brother housemates are actually doing there.

Still, even though that’s the plan, it doesn’t always turn out to be what you think it is; from D-Grade soap stars to Madonna, famous people are constantly whinging about obtaining the very thing they yearned for. In this way, perhaps Myspace is relative, and ultimately beneficial, in that despite the projected sense of “fame” many bloggers seem to enjoy basking in (even if it’s the reverse psychology of those who pretend, in an “emo” sort of way, to despise it), on the whole, it’s a fairly low dosage of it. From a fair amount of naivety, I studied the hit rates and success of the larger business sites – official websites of TV shows (like Idol and Biggest Loser), and larger corporate journalist blogs (like Radar) – and until recently, I had no idea how successful my two sites have been, simply because I’d never ventured out to observe the numbers on most so-called “popular” blogs. People are certainly transcending their immediate social limitations, but they’re very rarely cracking the bigtime.  Most people aren’t dealing with very high numbers – which is probably just as well, because once you’re reaching a serious amount of people, things get a little… well… difficult (which we will go into more, in the next installment).

Part of the challenge to create a truly successful blog has so much to do, these days, with the amount of blogs that are out there. The market is huge – you can’t just pick a quirky subject and have Google search engines find you, and bring people in. As it is, Google search engines are over-run by a variety of dodgy rules that make it very hard for the little people to compete on a search-engine basis. Not only do you have a huge amount of competition – meaning that you have to pull people’s attention away from other sites (which means the quality has to be very high, and what you’re saying has to be really powerful and different) – you have to find people, in the first place. Winning people over is the creative part, but this means nothing if you can’t find an audience to judge you.

Still, after my uni adventures in cyberspace, I was constantly told that I was apparently “made” for blogging, and I would find myself wondering if these people had a point. I certainly liked the idea of it – I liked the opportunity to find an audience from such an immensely powerful creative position. After my first degree, determined to make my way into the film and television industry (as a writer), I hit the cold, hard reality of that industry - and not only the hurdles that stood in the way of your work finding society, but the tiny creative freedom you had at the end of it (if you got anywhere, at all). I watched my friends (from my original communications degree) go down, settling for the most ridiculous jobs in “writing” (script editing on bad soaps, for Christ’s sake), and of course, in the end, I became a marketing copywriter. It’s all very well when you’re getting your ego stroked (and delusions nurtured) as the naïve whiz-kid in a uni writing school. Being a “brilliant writer”, bla bla bla, means very little, when push comes to shove, in the real world. The real world is about the structures of business – plain and simple. It’s not about talent, and the quality is strangled by demography (where nothing new breaks through, because only what has been proven to sell in the past is perpetuated). And this all takes place in a complex, corrupted system, where ladder-climbing involves far too much subjective persuasion of the bastards who decide your fate. It’s actually very difficult. And it certainly isn’t much fun. If cyberspace and the blogging revolution provided a way where the little person with the idea can completely side-step “industry”, and deliver their idea without a single other process changing it or interfering with it, then I was all for it. It was never a thought I acted upon; but it was there, nonetheless. Blogging seemed a good idea.

Eventually, I fell in love – with a web designer, no less – and one of the things stopping me from acting on this thought (a technical incapacity) was removed.  Furthermore, he quite liked the idea, too, and began pushing me to put the thought into action and arrive in cyberspace as a blogger. The thought became increasingly determined, and I spent ocassional afternoons considering the challenges of blogging, and how one was to go about overcoming them.

In blogging, you don’t have to work your way into a business network that will give your work to the world (or “publish” you, in other words). But the downside is that this means you have to find your audience, in a cyber sea of millions of little fishies looking at the works of millions of little blogger fishies, all by yourself. People don’t go searching for blogs anymore, and many sites forbid using their forums to get the word out there (the supposedly free world of the net continues to become surprisingly capitalist, and especially in this new competitive environment, nobody gives free advertising to a “competitor”, anymore). You can’t really “look” for people, as such. You have to come up with a way that assures people are looking for you, and that in this search, there are avenues to exploit in order to be in the right place at the right time, for those people to see you. That’s a tough chemistry to pull off. I knew I would need to somehow find a topic to attach myself to, to find a need that would arise in the market that would allow me to slip in and offer some kind of alternative product. Ironically, I approached it in complete marketing mode.

Late last year, we were watching television, when on came an advertisement looking for desperate Australians to audition for what is without a doubt the lowest rung on the trash TV ladder, the hideously cruel Big Brother. It was the epitome of the social plague that is our lust for 15 minutes. For the young person dying to be known, blinded by a hunger for the interconnection, there truly is no greater head-fuck than that show. Nothing comes close to it. Every year, I watch with my mouth gaping, as a range of insecure, screwed up, lonely people (but in 2006, there’s just so many of them) throw themselves not only to a public who are (hello!?) drawn to the kill, but into the most depraved marketing machine ever to have been patented and sold to the network happy enough to milk everyone with it (that would be… Channel Ten).

Every year, Big Brother would slowly grow more poisonous - every last drop of integrity being replaced with advertising dollars, every genuine attempt to use the format for social introspection being thrown to the wind for sensationalist headline-grabbing. There was no doubt in my mind that BB06 would stoop to all new levels, and that for four months, the nation would actually be shocked by it (not a minute of that show was of any surprise to me - as anyone that came along for the ride, knows). For four months, the nation would be glued to the car accident – shocked, manipulated, outraged, but (most importantly) unable to stop consuming. Everything that was wrong with us would be right there on the screen, inside a horrendous marketing structure that, unlike 99.9% of the audience, I understood, perfectly. I loathe Big Brother. But I have never, for a single moment, underestimated it’s relevance – or the opportunity it does provide to connect with the country. Nobody on the actual show has ever managed to achieve it (but look at who they put on it, of course!) – but the chance is certainly there. That’s the irony of it.

And if we remember, one of my first experiences of cyber forums was on the official Big Brother website – which didn’t simply confirm that Big Brother (as sad as it is) meant something to people, but that I had perhaps underestimated just how much it meant, until this point. I nearly died, the first time I went in there. I was just a typical consumer, really - I saw the web address at the end of a show, and since I was currently exploring internet for the first time, I netsurfed my way over there. I had been on all the major forum and chatroom sites, but never had I seen so many people together in one space, at the same time. And they were madly posting, the interaction every bit as hostile and over-emotional as I now expect. I knew Big Brother gripped the nation, but I still felt like butting in, every now and then, with the obvious logic; “Um… hello, guys? It is just a mainstream trash TV show, yeah? It’s just taking your money, and using depraved sensationalism to grab your ratings - to boost advertising dollars. You do get that… don’t you?”