There is, recounted in Slavoj Zizek’s excellent 2008 book, Violence, a story of the food riots in Brazil, wherein the lower classes who lived in the favelas (slums, basically) of Brazil began to terrorize the middle class during a food shortage. Commentators and news media dismissed the violence of the lower class, suggesting the violence was directly precipitated by the food shortage. Zizek, however, suggested that the violence was about more than not having enough to eat—for those in the favelas were no strangers to empty pantries and empty bellies: the violence was to gain visibility. After all, “a riot,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. suggested decades earlier, “is the language of the unheard.”
Good writing—be it an article, a novel, a blog, or graffiti—is meant to be provocative, to incite, and to be inflammatory. We do not write out of complacency.
Graffiti is perhaps the most apparent example of this: consider, how often do you see graffiti that reads “I love my job/government/etc.” or “I love The Man”? You don’t. Why? Because there is little urgency in expressing feelings of complacency. Graffiti, like the woodblock prints of Kathe Kollwitz’s from the early twentieth century is medium of inflammatory, revolutionary messages that are characterized by a need for urgency and mass expression. Woodblock prints are cheap to make (and cheap, from an economics of labor perspective)—one could literally make hundreds of them and scatter them across a city in a couple of hours’ time. So is buying a can of Krylon or a magic marker and scribbling on a stop sign or a building. With the latter method, there is also the added element of the subversion, insofar as graffiti is a criminal offense. The message then—almost out of necessity—must be revolutionary, for the very act of spraying it on a building is, itself, a revolutionary/subversive gesture.
A blog is not unlike graffiti or a woodblock print. It is equally democratic, insofar as anyone with internet access can host a blog. It has mass communication potential, as there is virtually no limit to one’s audience. And, it’s fast. To write and post a blog could (without editing, of course) take only a few minutes, if not less. And, like graffiti or a woodblock print, blogs are often (as they should be) inflammatory and provocative. The internet breeds extreme opinions—hardly anyone goes on WebMD to post that their headache turned out to be anything less than cancer or an aneurysm; no one goes on a restaurant’s website to post that the food was anything less than excellent or absolutely horrific. Why? Because these types of statements (complacency, namely) are not suited for the medium (the internet).
Communication via a blog/graffiti/wheat-paste poster/woodblock print is about visibility. (Consider how graffiti, in particular, seems to sprout overnight, from seemingly nowhere, on buildings and street signs.) That is precisely why the contents of such messages are so often inflammatory or provocative.