People have peculiar ideas about blogs and Livejournals, don’t they? It’s hard not to be confronted with the fact almost weekly. For a start, there’s the small issue that a significant proportion of the population over the age of 40 don’t even really know what they are, and when confronted with them are baffled. Why on earth, they ask, would anyone be interested in the brain-farts of a bunch of random people talking about what they had for tea? “It’s a crazy world we live in,” they probably think to themselves, before shaking their heads and shuffling off to watch “Eastenders”, a particularly depressing soap consisting entirely of the trials and tribulations of a bunch of people who don’t even exist.

The most common accusation shoved at people who keep blogs is that they’re an egotistical exercise, an outlet for attention seeking drama queens who wish they were famous or successful. I’m sure that’s true for some of the journals I’ve seen, particularly those kept by teenage members of appalling punk bands, but generally speaking anyone thinking that a blog will get them “attention” is wasting their time. They really might as well attempt to become famous by doing something slightly more visible instead. There are millions of blogs out there, some of them extremely well written, some by professional journalists and authors, all free, and all vying for everyone’s attention. Most will be lucky if they have sixty loyal readers, and most of those will consist of people within their family and social circle. There are a few people who are famous primarily for blogging, but these are the exceptions, not the rule.

I say all the above not as some great disclaimer, but because I feel that certain people in the public eye are missing the point a little bit. Jack White of the White Stripes, for instance, went on a rather unnecessary rant a few weeks ago about how Internet users are attempting to describe his body of work whilst missing the point. This, for whatever reason, makes him furious. Imagine. A whole bunch of people he doesn’t even know chattering about his music with wonder, but getting it slightly wrong. How dare they?

His point is flawed on a whole number of levels. Firstly, when they’re writing a blog few people sit up and declare themselves to be an “expert” on the subject they’re approaching. Blogs are usually the first reserve of the amateur enthusiast who has no place to put their passions. When I was growing up in smalltown Essex as a teenager, I’d have loved a public access forum where I could talk about Wire. Wire were (and are) one of my favourite bands, but as a fifteen year old I found them enormously difficult to get my head around. Their lyrics could sometimes seem like stream-of-consciousness surreal nonsense (and were even written off as such by some music critics at the time) and there wasn’t enough background information to get a full point of entry. A blog would have opened up a whole new world of understanding to me, and through making my own mistakes and being corrected by other fans, I’ve no doubt that I would have found an even greater appreciation, or possibly a more interesting series of interpretations. Besides that, I would honestly say that I trust the knowledge of the people on my LiveJournal friends list at present far more than that of the average NME hack, but that’s a subsidiary issue.

The other point is, of course, that I find artists, musicians and writers who veil their work in a shroud of secrecy and then get angry when it’s publically misinterpreted to be very peculiar indeed. Mystery invites misinterpretation, invites speculation as to how the conjuror achieved his trick. If you give few interviews, tell outlandish lies in your earliest ones, cover your work in colour coded enigmas and work to a strict minimalist pattern, you’re practically inviting excitable gossip. That sounds like a criticism, but in actual fact it isn’t. I admire the way The White Stripes haven’t played the celebrity gossip game in the traditional way and haven’t courted the glossy mags with chatter about their personal lives in any sort of obvious way, and have approached their work from a more art school angle – it makes it more interesting - but I find it downright unusual that Jack White would feel the need to complain about the side-effects. Bill Drummond never did. I’m sure The Residents didn’t either.

I’ve noticed over the years that people of a “creative” persuasion seem to get very upset or affronted when their work is misinterpreted, or is given a very personal meaning by someone which the author claims is nonsense. Never mind that the individual in question may have developed a close association between the work and a meaningful relationship of theirs, or even found that their misinterpretation has caused them to feel better about a bleak situation in their lives, it is still wrong. The writer does not feel like a Social Servant – no, he/she is in the business of being admired and understood for how clever they are, not being of comfort to others. People seem incredibly unwilling to let their work go and let it take its own path. Like cloying mothers, they seem to want to hold their output close to their chests and smother it with their own rigid ideologies. It cannot be loved for the wrong reasons by anyone else. People should not be allowed to make their own mistakes. Somewhat surprisingly, one of the few songwriters who really appreciates this is Morrissey, as he’s been very open about it in interviews.

Of course, much of this brouhaha has its origins in the fact that people in the media fear the amateur, for the pure and simple reason that the ordinary person – the person with passions and opinions who isn’t concerned about demographics – has a serious outlet for the first time since the late seventies when punk spewed out fanzine upon fanzine. Rather than seeing this as the supportive community it is, and also the boon to the industry it surely is, it is seen as the work of quacks (rather than hacks). As Joe Buzfuz said in a mail-out quite recently, it’s time to reclaim the use of the word “amateur” as a positive attribute, and stop thinking of it as a put-down. Besides which, I quite like the fact that under-read little blogs on LiveJournal are a source of red-faced frustration to people within the industry. Since when did anyone on the outside ever have that kind of power? As I said earlier, I think that the vast majority of blogs have little reach and that it’s an over-estimated medium, but screw ‘em, for as long as they’re running afraid, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t keep them on their toes. Perhaps more importantly, I can see no harm in people openly talking about and speculating upon what they love and pleasing themselves. It would be a dull world indeed without the right to choose how one appreciates somebody else's work.