Evan X. Merz

I'm sitting here, at my mid century Merton Gershun desk, surrounded by paintings of trees, trying to be a writer, when all I've ever been for my entire adult life is a blogger.

Blogging is comfortable for me. It's like my desk. It has all my favorite things. I can write a blog post almost automatically. I can sit down with an idea and bang out a blog post in 30 minutes flat.

Blog posts are easy for me because they are the writing format that I grew up with. Sure I wrote personal essays in school, and I wrote two reference books about music programming languages, but in the last twenty plus years, I've written hundreds of blog posts across several URLs. Blog posts are my vernacular.

Even as I type this post, I feel the compulsive need to insert images and links. There's a picture of my desk as a substitute for the ability to describe my work area using actual words. There's a link to an article about Merton Gershun so that I can pretend like I didn't start buying his furniture just because I thought he had a funny sounding name. There's a link to my prior writing so I can give the illusion that I'm a writer.

Blog posts were born of the technologies that I grew up with. HTML, digital cameras, a touch of css, and a little bit of javascript. With these things I am comfortable. Together they can be used to describe my thoughts accurately, because I think in "MULTIMEDIA!"

Multimedia was a huge thing when I was a teenager in the 1990s. I don't hesitate to say that "Multimedia" was legitimately a powerhouse of the weird corporate edutainment culture that somehow pervaded the entire world in the 90s. In the 1990s, you heard about multimedia everywhere. It was the future of computers, entertainment, publishing and teaching.

We literally learned how to make "multimedia" in school. They would show us videos about how to use and access multimedia in the library. They would teach us how to use esoteric multimedia devices that I never saw again in my life. I even remember teachers bravely allowing us to choose whether to write an essay, make a video, or create a webpage for some projects.

It's only natural that I started thinking in multimedia and that I feel drawn to turn that into blog posts. But as I begin to try to assemble a collection of words into something that might be a book, I'm starting to see how thinking in words is very different from thinking in multimedia.

In a way I use multimedia as a crutch and a distraction.

I include lots of miscellaneous links and images so that you don't notice that I'm not actually a very good writer. Why would I push myself to write about Merton Gershun when I can just link you to an article on some other website?

I also use multimedia to disguise the fact that I'm too scared to actually write honestly and openly about my own thoughts, feelings, and opinions. In a way I use multimedia as a screen that I can hide behind. I can pretend that I'm just here sharing pure facts with my audience, and thus it isn't weird that I'm not actually saying much about myself.

The blog posts I prefer to write are short and to the point. If you look at a few of the posts that have traveled with me from url to url, you can see that I mostly tended to write a title and a few sentences, then link to the piece of media I wanted to share.

But if I'm going to write something longer. An essay, or even a book, then I need to break those habits. I need to teach myself to rely on the written word, and I need to teach myself to share openly and honestly. I need to invite people into my world without fear that I'm a mediocre writer and a boring person.

So that's why I wrote this post. Hopefully it is the first step in breaking my multimedia addiction.