"You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog"

When I recently signed onto Facebook, the first thing I noticed was a large advertisement in the "News Feed" section for Wordclay, which described its services as "DIY Self Publishing on your own terms. What could be better?" I went to the website to look around a bit, and it allows you to upload your book and market it on your own in just six simple steps.

I wondered what would posess someone to publish their book in such a way, especially since this ad was on Facebook and therefore possibly targeted at college students? I recently read a rather entertaining article called "The Transom: You Can't Spill Mustard on a Blog" by William W. Savage, Jr. His article focused mostly on the way that people write on internet blogs (and it was published in 2006, so I'm not sure how big of a difference 2 years can be in the world of internet writng), but he made a comment that I think could apply to any type of website that allows people to publish works online. He writes that "One may write about whatever one pleases, without fear of vetting, editing, or anything else destructive of one's ego." This is interesting because one main difference between a person writing on a blog or on a site like Worclay and a person publishing something through a publisher is the process. If you "publish" something online, it is not subjected to the process of submitting it to an editor or having to rewrite it to meet certain standards. And it saves you from the criticism that you might get elsewhere. I found one quote from this article particularly entertaining:

I have come to the conclusion that academic blogging is a great deal like talk radio, albeit for intellectuals. Listen long enough to talk radio and you might--and I emphasize the conditional--hear an intelligent remark. But, for the most part, the medium seems to exist to encourage nitwits and crackpots to believe that somebody out there truly cares about their opinion. As a reader, I suspect that I shall continue to prefer the printed page over the monitor's glowing screen. It's easier on the eyes and better for the posture, don't you know.

This quote has some truth in it, although that nitwits and crackpots comment doesn't apply to our literary criticism class, of course. But although Savage seems quickly turned off by blogs, I think that sometimes the type of reading that a blog provides is just what interests me. I can enjoy the way that blog entries have that personal touch of someone's thoughts even though they are written for an abstract internet audience to read. However, I noticed that the way I read a blog differs a lot from the way I read something in print. When I read a blog or online article, I have a tendency to scan quickly through it and often I end up following some link that takes me to some tangent website and sometimes distracts me from the ideas of the blog. But I can hardly ever pick up a book to read without also picking up a pencil. Printed texts allow for more interaction and, for me, more focus. They just seem more real. I don't know if that perspective is changing though with more and more writing appearing online.