Emergent Business Networks

Why I Like Writing January 8, 2014

I have friends who are dyslexic. One saw me writing and asked “what are you doing?”. He assumed I was doing something painful and difficult because I had to.

When he asked me why I was writing, I had to think about the question because nobody was paying me to write and even in the most convoluted indirect economic justification for the use of my time seemed a massive stretch. So I just said “because it is fun”. He gave me a “you are weird” look. I could only say “guilty as charged your honor, yes I am weird”.

So I thought about this a bit more and decided to – yes  – write about it. For I am not the only weird person who writes for fun. In fact a lot of Internet entrepreneurs have got rich off our free labors. No worries, Ev Williams et al, I do it willingly and so I don’t begrudge you getting rich from free tools that make it easier for me to indulge my folly.

My inner editor is saying “cut to the chase, write the lede”. I like writing because:

1. It helps me to get my thinking clear. Sometimes this has an economic purpose, I am trying to understand some rapidly changing space in the technology business. I talk to lots of people, read a lot and then the process of writing helps me synthesise. Sometimes (this piece for example), it is just because understanding something is err, fun.

2. Feedback to complete my understanding. This is the beauty of online writing. The most obscure subject finds those other weird souls who are thinking about the same obscure subjects. That is why the Interest Graph is different from the Social Graph and why I tend to enjoy Twitter more than Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends and family, I just don’t expect them to share all my obscure interests.

3. Communicating. Its a social acceptable form of madness. The guy opposite me on the train is muttering to himself, talking to somebody who seems real to him but who is clearly not with him in meatspace. He is clearly mad as defined by society. Blogging/tweeting is a socially sanctioned form of this insanity. Thats OK with me, I saw the line recently that falling in love is a socially sanctioned form of insanity; so I am OK with another socially sanctioned form of insanity.

Before blogging enabled everybody to get published, many people made a good living from writing. I do sometimes have a twinge of guilt that I am yet another amateur helping to make life a bit harder for professional writers.