Blogospherification I'm imaginging now . . .

. . . a story, let's say a novel. It might have a small collection of principal characters (needn't nec. have a single protagonist). Anyway, this little group (we're just a few years into the future, and a few layers thicker into the Blogospherification of the Internet and the Internettification of the Globe) -- this group comprises a few insanely acute artist/writers who've completely abandoned interest in / aspiration toward "publishing" as (erstwhile) conventionally understood in the Pre-Internet Period (PIP = all of human history prior to 1992 or something, though in publishing-history context, more particularly signifying a mere couple centuries. [Strictly speaking, PIP in some circles was opined to signify "Proto-" rather than "Pre-": a micro-philosophical distinction that need not detain us].)

Let's allow this group, first of all, has cut the Profit Motive tether. For arguably complicated reasons (in themselves interesting, but we won't be delving into that history [nor its para-histories] right now), the wind of can-one-make-a-living-from-this? lucre-ambition had long since died away from the sails, for this brood of artists. This freed them up to get down & serious, of course. They plied their dayjobs (as waiters, taxicab drivers, musicians, stockbrokers, librarians, etc.) and let die the imagination of Money Thru Art or Riches Via Writing. They pursued art for its proverbial own sake, and they practiced & espoused the rich cultivation of a perspicuous blogospheric acre as the embodiment of human aims & activities self-evidently flooded with worth & utility. This utility (they were sort of postpostmod retro-Emersonians -- a few were furthermore retro-PreRaphelites, though that's anther issue & belongs in a later chapter; {for this -- you know -- could simultaneously be a description & a chapter! -- & if the latter, presumably an (or, come to that, the) initial one; but back to my story or, I suppose, argument} -- this utility (I was saying) was, for these bloggonauts, the human per se utility (intellectual & esthetic, literary & post-literary, in some respects possibly even spiritual) -- the human utility, then, of all such cultural life, ultimately: a focus-point for the mind to find iteslf (as in a mirror); a sphere for thoughts to soar (as in a sky), a branch for leaves, a trellis, a breeze. Happiness.

But the interesting thing I want to imagine more fully (& grasp more complexly) in this tale, is the divorce (& its consequences) between blog-writing (by arguably, in PIP terms, "publishable" writers) and the "desire to publish" (again, in PIP terms). This "untethering" (as said above) or "divorce" (as said here) freed blogging from any direct association with the realm of books, as it were, as likewise from the concerns of lucre. Career ambition, here, was sheerly artistic ambition; it lacked the money-hook that erstwhile (since perhaps the 18th Century or so) had insinuated itself into the notion of the writing life as a form of endeavor.

Blogging, here, was not for sake of getting an entre to the world of publishing, nor for flogging one's wares hailing from that world, nor any other such situation of blogo-compromise. Far from it. Blogging itself (pure & simple) was now publishing per se. Publishing (in the old PIP sense -- in the erst PP sense) was seen as a misconstruction, a ludicrous misstep of thought, at best an archaic stepping-stone phase, charming & childish. A wisty bluster of vagrom, vestigal meanings, long gone (now) w/ the wind.



The story would need development. That's the merest sketch of it.