The Hole in the Blog Doughnut: Humor
Must post. Must not be a victim of the Grimacing Reaper carrying his scythe made in China and bearing the words “Death to the Anonymous.” That is, after all, the greatest fear of any American, above death even, since technology has made death an unlikely and politically incorrect option. Being anonymous signifies a purposeless life. Today, we are allowed some limelight, an opportunity to be “saved,” still in a religious sense but with technology filling the gap opened when God and the Holy Ghost left for the coast.
Must post. Must not be a victim of the Grimacing Reaper carrying his scythe made in China and bearing the words “Death to the Anonymous.” That is, after all, the greatest fear of any American, above death even, since technology has made death an unlikely and politically incorrect option. Being anonymous signifies a purposeless life. Today, we are allowed some limelight, an opportunity to be “saved,” still in a religious sense but with technology filling the gap opened when God and the Holy Ghost left for the coast.
Now, we can live as posters/users/im-er’s in the eternity of cyberspace, the nearly infinite world that has become our eternal present. We will never be anonymous so long as search engines ferret out our “Joe Smith,” or eZine has published a six-hundred word scrap of our regurgitated, how-to article. We wear invisible badges, “I am on the Internet..”
This is serious stuff, this notoriety business, the being seen and digested as an Internet entity. No matter that we’re only one of twenty million pages. Being published on the net has become, for the even vaguely tech-savvy, a rite of passage. The sense of the old question, “Are you published?” evinces fewer dreads and excuses these days. We can answer genuinely, “Yes, I am! Read my article on www.we-accept-anything.com.” The meaning of publication has changed from acceptance by a small literary magazine to being posted on a website, a far easier process:
- The content can, in fact must, be shorter, a few hundred words in length at most
- The article can be easily read by anyone having Internet access; no need to buy that obscure magazine
- We need have nothing worth saying, so long as the topic is popular
The last item is not overstated. Here is a sample of current eZine contributions:
- Teeth Whitening Gel – An Easy Way To Whiten Your Teeth?
- 5 Puppy toys you can make from Swanson TV dinner trays
- Does Attracting Take a Long Time or Does It Just Seem That Way?
- How to Recognise Scorpio
- Go Pro With Your Garage
- Is the Law of Attraction the Shortcut to Success?
- 8 things to do with extra cat hair
- Know the Different Types of Wigs
- Banish The Living Room Eyesore With Media Storage
What do the above have in common? Each involves information delivery, no matter how inane. Other articles on the site, many, in fairness, focus on more serious topics, but the theme remains instructional or enlightening, in the simplest sense.
Where in the transition from hard copy to cyber copy did society lose its penchant for humor? The fact is, articles merely in the vein of humor submitted to a content-marketing site will be dismissed as lacking general interest (i.e.— having no use).
We live during an age in transit, moving away from the general to the quantifiable. The chaotic appeal of madcap description has given way to the “how-to” mentality. Call this “step thinking,” a one, two, three itemization. Usually the format isn’t overt, but this style and intent characterize the structure of most articles. Can such sequential writing be accomplished even with well-written material of a humorous nature? Usually not, as the purpose of such writing is to expose the all too serious, and often bogus, organizational net we attempt to throw over our experience in an effort to tame and cope with it.
Humorous writing is utterly deficient by current Internet practices. It isn’t functional, not in the slightest, nor is it meant to be. Humor jabs at our weaknesses, our failings, and allows us to live with them, an unpleasant feeling we tend to avoid. And, who has time for reading humor when we could be learning the specifics of things like cleaning our drains or scanning our brains? The Internet is the information superhighway, not a country road with curio shops and exhibits. The Internet thus becomes the poster child for the inverse of the slogan, “the journey is more important than the destination.” The destination is it, the sum of our efforts, the literal end-all. To what “end” do we aspire? Knowledge, but a deviant form of knowledge consisting of facts gathered under the umbrella of some topic. Nonsense, the reality of it and the joy of it, has become, if not an evil, a concept to be avoided.
In a manic society rushing toward the unknown, heads crammed with facts, we are becoming formal, nearly ritualistic in our worship of technology. All the highways are paved and lead into an endless horizon. The surface is rigid. The vehicle of information gathering never allows us pause to reflect on the landscape. The irony here is that more is less: more facts, less understanding, more knowledge, less wisdom. Recognizing the non-sense of this condition is the very purpose of humor, its function. In a world of article bullets and “h1” headers, we’ve never needed to laugh at ourselves so much as now.
Guest post by: Mike lives in Florida as a retired high school English teacher. He devotes most of his time working on his websites and writing on Artist's Inlet Press. His writing output tends toward social criticism and common sense analysis of website content quality. Mike's hero is Jack Kerouac.
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