Cryptic

I think the Era of the Unsophisticated Blog is well and truly over.

Just a few years back, blogs were backdoors into people's minds. Everyone splashed raw emotions candidly across their webpages, bouyed by the rush that full and frank disclosure brought. Blogs were public platforms that suddenly became accessible even to the layman, a rare commodity unleashed upon a hungry market.

All that changed as people gradually felt the ill-effects of putting their whole lives on the net. If you keep a blog, you would know what I mean. A myriad of things can happen... your pictures get pilfered and circulated, your posts cause misunderstandings, mere acquaintances start gaining access to your innermost thoughts and feelings.

That's why blogs are so different nowadays, at least amongst experienced users. Beyond the occasional objective record of an event, say a birthday party or a night out clubbing, it's really quite hard to figure out what any given blogger is really trying to say anymore.

Yes. It is with great satisfaction that I tell all of you, the ones who always accuse me of being overly cryptic, that you can hardly find a blog out there that's not cryptic anymore.

If you approach blog-reading the way you do literature, there are indeed tools available to enhance understanding. You need:

1. To know the blogger's background, especially of his recent history
2. To know his desired audience
3. To have read enough of his posts to recognize patterns and styles

Basically, no one has time to do any of that. So, in effect, I think the large majority of posts go misunderstood, and hardly ever achieve their desired effect.

This creates consequences:

1. You can't read into someone's posts with any degree of certainty anymore.
2. You can't weave hidden meanings and messages into your posts anymore, and hope that that special target audience will understand.
3. You must be very, very careful about what you write, lest it be taken out of context (I think my friend Tris will understand this, haha)

Don't be mistaken, I'm glad that blogs are unreliable channels of communication. Humans were never meant to interact this way. We're supposed to size each other up, observe the hundred and one tell-tale body language signals, then decide if someone is telling us the truth.

We're not supposed to hop on someone's blog and hope to uncover nuggets of feelings or intentions or motives neatly ensconced in a few cryptic references. That's really a recipe for disaster in most cases.

That being said... I like being cryptic. And drama, evidently. =)