Is Blog Graphomania ...

... Nuisance of the Internet Age OR Active Democracy?

I had a long conversation with ‘my better half’ last night about the blogging frenzy. He claims, or at least vaguely hopes, that self acclaimed political bloggers will eventually become a force to be reckoned with. That the internet itself may become an arena for independent political candidates. That bloggers will put pressure on politicians, by doing what journalists should normally do, that is: fact checking and rectifying when politicians make false statements, furnishing thorough information - delving into issues by doing historical and background research, voicing people’s opinions – especially when they are in contradiction with those of the people in power. It is a fact that journalists often fail to do this because this kind of journalism doesn’t always sell newspapers and/or commercials, and may disturb the governing forces.

But will the bloggers do the job? That is the question I ask myself. Because on the contrary, the internet already carries so many voices and so much irrelevant personal material, that I wonder if it’s not going to submerge the more valuable writings. Already, every other person wants to tell his/her life story on the internet, despite the fact that it will probably not be of interest except for at most the 10-20 persons that surround that blogger. We are by and large suffering, if not from pure narcissism, then at least from a severe case of ‘graphomania’.

One of my favourite authors, Milan Kundera, first in his novel ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ and later in the essay ‘The Art of the Novel’, denounced graphomania, way before its outburst on the internet. He says graphomania is a compulsion "to express oneself," regardless of whether this expression serves any practical function. According to Kundera “Graphomania … takes on the proportions of a mass epidemic whenever society develops to the point where it can provide three basic conditions: 1. a high enough degree of general well-being to enable people to devote their energies to useless activities; 2. an advanced state of social atomisation and the resultant general feeling of the isolation of the individual; 3. a radical absence of significant social change in the internal development of the nation. (in this connection [he finds it] symptomatic that in France, a country where nothing really happens, the percentage of writers is twenty one times higher than in Israel)”. It is probably safe to say that with the Internet we have reached the ‘Age of Graphomania’. But again, according to Kundera, “mass graphomania itself reinvents and aggravates the feeling of general isolation. The invention of printing originally promoted mutual understanding. In the era of graphomania the writing of books has the opposite effect: everyone surrounds himself with his own writings as with a wall of mirrors cutting off all voices from without …”.

Not that I don’t understand the impulse of writing. I myself have reflected on the reasons I have for carefully storing and classing my personal mail, as well as my old diaries. What are my intentions with these writings? Am I going to spend my old age reading through those? Or am I wistfully preparing for someone to stumble upon them once I ‘am gone’. And Kundera described it even better: “For everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words.”