My flabber is utterly gasted – the world really has gone mad. Noodling around Technorati this morning, in between knocking up a pan of minestrone soup with pork sausages (tremendous bias towards US sports and politics, I find; on Technorati, that is, not in my soup), I spotted an ad for a ghost-writing service, so I clicked on it and it blew me away.
Among the services offered is, astoundingly, ghost blogging – 3 x 300 word articles per week for $99 a month. Bloody hell, am I ever in the wrong job!
Really, though, this beggars belief – surely a blog is a highly personal thing; you can often get a feel for the person behind the blog from his/her writing, but I wonder just how many blogs out there are actually ghost-written? And is it ethical?
My personal feeling is that if you can’t write, then you probably shouldn’t (please!) – and that applies to all those ghost-written C-list celeb “auto”-biographies that litter the book stores. Auto my ass, you talentless losers!
The thing is, though, when a book is ghost-written, it’s basically the words of the celeb in question, or at least their ideas, with added literacy. With a ghosted blog, though, you have some person on the other side of the world, maybe, writing whatever they like in your name (or, at least, your screen name – why don’t more bloggers write in their own names, I wonder?), so it’s not at all, in any sense of the word, your blog. It’s theirs, and that’s fundamentally dishonest – it’s a fraud. OK, no-one’s harmed by the deception, but it’s still a deception. A blog, if it should be anything, should at least be personal.
It’s impossible to know how many blogs are ghost-written – I can assure you this one, for better or worse, isn’t – but as the service exists (and how many others offer this service?), there must be a demand. There are certainly bloggers who should use such a service – we’ve all seen blogs where the writer can barely string six words together, and I’ve often wondered if they know how crap they are?
You know, I’ve been taken to task in the past, for criticising semi-literate bloggers (and I don’t mean those who use English as a second, or even third, language – they’re doing something I couldn’t do – but native English speakers), because I’m lucky I can write. Er, no. Luck has sod all to do with it – I worked damned hard at school, 50-odd years ago to acquire decent language skills (when I was in my teens, I was too ill for PE or games, so my English teacher took me under his wing, and gave me old GCE English exam papers to do – it’s only recently I’ve come to appreciate how hard he must have worked to keep me supplied – and he marked them), and in the years since I’ve honed my skills, until now I think I can write well enough to be entertaining, not just informative. Luck, as I said, featured not at all. (Sorry if you’ve read this before – I know I’ve written something similar somewhere but I can’t find it here; I’ve looked.)
I feel very strongly that if you are writing stuff you expect people to read (and if you don’t, what’s the point?), then you have an obligation to make it as pleasurable an experience as you can – not, for example, fill a page with text almost entirely unpunctuated and in lower case (hell, I even get email like that, occasionally, and it’s just deleted). Your readers should not have to work to extract your meaning; what you have to say may be earth-shattering, but who’s going to care enough to struggle with it? OK, you’ll still get the hit even if, as I’ve done too many times, visitors just say “WTF?” and smartly clear off somewhere else. So if hits are all you want, fine, write rambling, stream-of-consciousness bollocks, but if you want people to actually read what you write then, hey, put a bit of work into it, OK?
Damn, I’ve wandered off the point, so looking back three paras, yes, there are clearly bloggers who could use such a service and don’t, so who does? And is $99 a month a sensible price to pay for something that can be had for free? I just can’t figure that out. There seems to be no conceivable point in, or excuse for, having someone write your blog for you because – and this actually matters – it’s not, then, your blog, no matter whose name’s on it. You’re mainly deceiving yourself and paying for the privilege.
I don’t write. Well, that’s not quite true; I write academic essays and stuff, but it’s mostly regurgitated research and my own conclusions. I’ve never really felt the need to add my voice to the countless time-wasters mooing at each other on the blogoglobe (until today perhaps?).
I think this is because I’m so used to writing in third-person that writing about myself just feels weird.
My own blog is just pictures, with the occasional explainatory caption. And it’s there for my own leisure. I really don’t expect anyone else to see it, or care. It’s sparsity is evidence of that.
I see the point in ghost-writing. It’s a way for people to publish their story when they don’t have the skill to do so themselves. Sometimes they’re valuable stories and worthwhile sharing. Not everyone can read and write, even though they may be talented in other areas.
Ghost-blogging however? I can see how you’d feel it’s disingenuous. Even fraudulent. But is it worthless? It’s better than nothing. At least there’s some record of whoever didn’t have time to detail the minutiae of their life for complete strangers.
I’m not in love with the idea, and there’s no way in hell I’d pay someone to pretend to be me. But I’d happily fake it for someone with cash. You must have considered it yourself…
In closing, my ninth grade English teacher also took me under his wing, until I used the word ‘fustian’ in a sentence, and he said it wasn’t a real word, because it wasn’t in his crappy pocket dictionary. I lost respect for him after that.
I hope the last ten minutes I spent writing that wasn’t a waste of time.
yours cordially,
Erik
Morning Erik,
My problem with ghost blogging – at least in the way in which it works – is that it would not, in any sense at all, be my blog, were I to take that route. The ghost blogger gets $99 and for that produces posts of their own choosing; the client has no input. That, for me, is the antithesis of blogging. And, yes, I have considered becoming a ghost blogger, but very briefly. I decided against it for that very reason – the views expressed would be mine, and not those of my client which, for me, at least, makes it pointless. If it was, say “Ron writing for whoever, as he’s away sick,” then that would be fine – keeping the blog live that way is fair enough (readers can be fickle – on the rare days when I don’t post anything new, there’s a noticeable dip in my hits); posing as “whoever” indefinitely is just wrong.
In fact, as far as I can see, there’s no client-ghost-blogger relationship at all – you pay the company, and one of their people writes your posts. I assume there’s a questionnaire involved at some point, as if I was paying I’d want my likes and dislikes known – I wouldn’t want someone posing as me to post about football, when I loathe the game, or bang on about wine when I drink beer.
I don’t think that bloggers “detail the minutiae of their life for complete strangers.” a great deal these days (blogs, of course, were originally just a favourite website listing – a web log – but they metamorphosed pretty rapidly when people realised their potential as online soap-boxes). I post mostly opinion pieces, like this, interspersed with benefits and disability advice. OK, I feature rather a lot in my disability posts, because I know mine better than anyone else’s, but on the whole truly personal posts are rare on RR.
Right, must go and read the papers, to see what I’m going to write/bitch about today. Got to keep my public happy, you know