Apparently a blog is created every second. By the end of the year there will be 30m of them; 3,600 alone will be created while you’re peeling the potatoes and making the bread sauce this morning.
A blog, for those of you who haven’t discovered them yet, is an interactive online diary on any subject at all — goldfish, constipation, Iraq, sex, recipes, politics, having curly hair, and so on. What is fascinating is not just that both the sublime and the ridiculous are lovingly chronicled, but that the minutiae of strangers’ lives, often accompanied by photographs, should be quite so compelling and, on occasion, so oddly touching.
Sometimes the reason for the addictive nature of the blog is obvious — “Salam Pax”, an Iraqi who began blogging in the build-up to the invasion of his country in 2003, is now a newspaper columnist and commentator on Iraqi matters — but sometimes its powerful attraction is barely explicable: for every Salam Pax there’s an all-American housewife sharing her recipe for muffins and grumbling about her husband, or a woman obsessively listing what makeup and clothes she puts on each day, or a man rating the prostitutes he’s visited along with the tunes he’s downloaded onto his iPod.
What does this mean? That everyone wants to be a writer, and that everyone is secretly a narcissist, willing to dig uncomfortably deep into his or her own family life in exchange for a strange, fleeting (and unpaid) kind of notoriety? Not quite. Most of the domestic blogs are frequented by the blogger’s friends and family, blogging being an excellent way of keeping in touch when, for whatever reason, you’re far away from home.
The journalist Deborah Hutton, who died of lung cancer last month, created a blog that she added to most days, writing about her illness and family life. Blogs are interactive, so her readers could reply. The result was a sort of publicly private world, a comforting little enclave of sanity that enabled Hutton not to have the same telephone conversation 15 times a day and, equally practically, acted as a space where she and her friends (and admirers and fellow sufferers) could chat, joke, express anger or joy, and share their more complicated emotions.
But blogs also have a dangerous side. The outpouring of domestic minutiae might make the world seem a cosier, smaller, friendlier place, but there is nothing to stop anyone anonymously writing a toxic account of their working life (a man in Scotland did just that, writing about working for a bookseller called “Bastardstones”; sadly, his employer worked out his identity and sacked him) just as there is nothing stopping your teenager from writing, in detail, about his miserable life and your failings as a parent.
Misbehave at a party, and the picture of you falling out of your dress might make it onto a fellow guest’s blog. But this is all small potatoes: the area where blogging really is making a difference is if you are a celebrity, keen on presenting an image to the world that is somewhat at odds with the reality of your life.
If you were Rock Hudson, for example, it was possible to live your public life as you saw fit, concealing an (entirely private, in my view) sexual orientation and, later, illness. That situation — give or take the odd appearance in The National Enquirer, a trashy American tabloid no one takes seriously — continued unchanged until recently. Sexual misdemeanours, drugs, drink and the rest could remain a Hollywood star’s secret. There might be gossip, but gossip is unproveable. Newspaper columnists might allude to things in code, but that code is usually reserved for other people in the know. Basically, you were pretty safe.
No longer. The gossip blogs are fierce and fearless: there are dozens and dozens of them, and they name and shame on a daily basis. People write about sleeping with X, where X is, say, everyone’s favourite superstar family man, stating the date, time and venue of the assignation along with X’s sexual preferences, prowess, or the lack of it. They print text messages, and allow you to listen to what X said on their voicemail. They write about the drugs they took, the drink they drank, the family-unfriendly practices they indulged in.
Some of these bloggers may be fantasists — but not all of them. And if even a fraction of what they say is true, there is simply no way on earth that even the most controlling, rottweiler-like A-list publicists can keep a lid on this kind of incendiary material for long. Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Mariah Carey, Tom Cruise and Colin Farrell are among the bloggers’ current favourites.
Recent events in London have shown us that, when immediacy is of the essence, the best news gatherers are the public: for weeks now, news reports have owed much to camera phones and laptops. We are all reporters on our own and each other’s lives. The news has become instant: something happens, and it is online within minutes.
Celebrities might be forgiven for locking themselves away in a frenzy of paranoia, but the rest of us, if we are that way inclined, should rejoice in the fact that there is nothing left not to know.
- After the death of Dr Robert Atkins in 2003, the company founded in his name began manufacturing the sort of fake sweets, fake cakes and fake shakes he would have disapproved of. Last week the company filed for bankruptcy. Cue lots of stupid, gloating articles about how the Atkins diet doesn’t work. Well, excuse me: any doctor, my GP included, will tell you it does work, which is why I am 10½ lb lighter than I was two weeks ago, and counting.
Furthermore, done properly — you need to read the book from cover to cover, not guzzle red meat and cream like an imbecile — it makes you feel unbelievably well, causes you (or at least me) to eat more vegetables and leap out of bed in the morning full of energy.
The diet is always going to be controversial, and people are entitled to their opinions. But it would be helpful if those yelling about its calamitous effects had actually read the book. There is nothing wrong with avoiding sugar, alcohol, processed food or additives, or about eating whole grains, vegetables, organic meat and eggs. And the sooner we get this into our heads the sooner we’ll stop being an obese nation breeding obese children.
