Should this blog have a theme? A lot of blogs do. Themes are great for attracting a specific audience, for advancing a particular agenda, for promoting discourse amongst bloggers, and so-on. But the idea of “themes” vaguely irks me.
My concern is with the creation of feedback loops. There’s something subtly problematic about seeking information, opinion, argument, truth from a predictable source. If you know what to expect, you begin to shape your own reality, choosing to expose yourself to progressively narrower sources of information. I wonder if there is a reinforcing effect generated by this narrowness- when you focus on one particular subject, the content is not only limited by the scope of that subject but by the slant of your beliefs. The readers perhaps both enjoy and enhance this effect, and as the blog is popularized, it comes to embody its own cartoonish focus… No one is helped by this phenomenon, not the reader who chooses what to believe before he chooses who and what to read, nor the writer, who pretends to examine the world but instead simply filters it through his particular lens.
Of course, there are other ways to theme a blog. Many blogs are vaguely focused on the “unique experience” of a particular person. Some of these devolve into weird manifestos that purport to reflect the type of person who writes the blog. Titles like “Generation X Diaries” or “Angry Fat Bald Guy” betray the same sort of caricaturing that undermines the honesty of political blogs. How does a writer avoid trying to live up to the persona they are cultivating through the blog? How does the blog avoid becoming a flawed piece of stereotyping, eventually parodying itself?
StuffWhitePeopleLike is pretty brilliant within the context of this paradigm. The jokes aren’t really that funny, and the overall message is sort of nauseating (particularly the implication that minorities are incapable of appreciating quality journalism, food, education, etc.) but the quietly sardonic tone evokes the fate of the themed blog: self-parody.
Unfortunately, the alternative to succumbing to a one-dimensional theme is generating an incoherent spree of rambling, self-indulgent journal entries. Oops.
“Oh, bother.”
