This posting every day is tiring me out. You see I write for work as well. Letters, executive communication, press releases, project descriptions, &tc. So although I love words, both ingesting and excreting, I do sometimes feel speechless when faced with a blank page, blinking cursor or no. My work voice can be very pompous or beseeching depending on the context.
A few summers ago I took a public relations class at one of the local university’s continuing education programs. We briefly studied the history of public relations, its use after WWI, and it’s infiltration into the corporate sphere. There was lots of subtext about the inherent nature of PR, its (dis)honesty, its manipulation of ‘truth’. Then we studied lots of theory. OMG, so much theory. It’s a very murky field because some things that shouldn’t work, work and somethings that should work, don’t and meanwhile the public is learning about how they are being manipulated and developing more and more defenses (like an immune system) to the control being spun by the machine.
I wonder too about the conflation occuring because of blogs — personal journalism, personal interest (design, craft, books, &tc), professional, corporate — how does public relations figure into all of this. Are people ‘keeping it real’ (can you even keep it real? what is the nature of reality?) Some have asserted that Andy Warhol’s notion of ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes’ has been replaced by a global notion of ‘everyone will be famous for fifteen people‘. How are we shaping people’s perception of our lives? Are we being honest or is there a slant (conscious or subconscious) that is creating a ‘meta-mutant’ persona? I
The other day I was reading a blog (I can’t remember which one right now, I’ll update when I find the link) and there was something about the voice that made me think the blog was ‘inauthentic’. It was constructed as a personal journal, but there was something about it that made me think ‘Nuh-uh, this person is gunning for something’ — a book contract, a job, a site fully supported by advertising — and I was turned off, perhaps it wasn’t true but it was enough for me to close tab and move onto something else.
