Cultivating vs Creating Content

My posts of late have followed the same pattern of link-plus-commentary eerily reminiscent of my Tumblr, which itself started as a link blog. If I'm being completely honest, a lot of the things I post here start as pithy Tumblr posts, and are only slightly more fleshed-out on my "real" blog.

I want to be okay with this. I think I should be okay with this.

Riffing off someone else's work usually results in some of my best, most thought-out posts, and I always make sure to credit the source first. It's not like I'd adding nothing original, so why does it feel like a lazy-woman's cop out?

During my inchoate web days, I spent a lot of time on pop culture forums. Most of what was posted was links from other sites; rare was the 1000-word screed about someone's actual life. (Which, come to think of it, would be really impractical when you're limited to only so many characters, not to mention wanting to maintain some sense of anonymity online.) About five or six years ago, I entered the world of personal, diary-type blogging. I sucked at it. No really -- my life would make a terrible sitcom. Or I guess these days, a terrible reality show.

There's an unspoken rule that to be a successful diarist you has to open up a wound and bleed for the audience. The blog world is full of that: it's relatable, it resonates with readers. I think it's wise to note that most of the really successful diary-type bloggers are women. When I started blogging, Dooce (before she was known primarily as a mommyblogger) was my template, but I didn't know how to make the minutiae of my daily life sound interesting. I chipped away at this formula for a few years before I realized "you know, this isn't really my bag."

Women as cultivators of the web should be granted the same privileges. Most political  or pop cultures sites pull content from other sites and add their own commentary, but women are, at large, underrepresented at those sites, and in the feminist/SJ blogosphere, where women have a stronger voice, there's a fair amount of wound-opening.

I'm not trying to disparage that: clearly there's a place for the personal essay, but if you're just ill-equipped at writing about your own life, you're lazy... or not relatable. Women have a greater expectation to write about themselves, and if they're not, there must be something wrong. I believe in self-protection, which is a great reason for not spilling one's virtual guts, but also placing greater emphasis on women who are good web curators and pundits.