Online Presence: Like a Voice in a Storm

To continue as I started, with contentless, metaphor-riddled drivel concerning the nature and being of this blog, I will tackle the idea of 'web presence'.
     It is pretty universally acknowledged at this point that if you want to be anything, you must find a place to be it. There are two points to this. 1) In a world of individual fame and the figure-heading of one to stand for a body of all, success is measured and created by public awareness. No one achieved anything if they couldn't be patted on the back afterwards - preferably by millions of strangers. 2) For a long time, there has been a right and a wrong place to present and publish oneself. Though the blogosphere may seem so much more impartial, one's setting is still very much everything. Where you are on the internet is a big deal. Or rather, where you are in terms of connection to elsewhere is a big deal.
     There are those stories about great writers and artists and whathaveyous¹ only being recognised for their achievements after death. Van Gogh is perhaps the go-to guy on this front. So here's the question: would Van Gogh have fared any better if he had started with a flickr or a Tumblr or any other blog or website carrying a seeming vendetta against the letter 'e'? How would greater public awareness, even on a small scale, affected the overall reception of Vincent's work pre- and post-mortem? And would his current standing of 'greatness' have been heightened or diluted, or maybe even revoked by the frame with which his presence was formed?
     Now I am not going to ignore that there are still artists discovered and revered after their deaths catching media attention today. And I'm not going to suggest that there are not artists who make their way without having to tweet and tumbl and blog. Nor am I suggesting that there is anything wrong with these internet practices. What I'm exploring is just what effect the sheer ease of access for most people has had on the reception of created goods. Anyone can get a blog. Anyone can use it to promote their art. Anyone can sell that art to anyone as long as they both have something resembling internet access. It's pretty incredible. But at what point are there too many voices? At what point does the cacophony become so great that, for any person who has been told they need an online presence, the best they can hope for is to become a dull murmur in the audience, waiting vigilantly before the stage? And oh that stage looks pretty, but I wonder how beautiful it looks from upon it.
     In a century's time, this place will be a graveyard of ghostly voices, calling out from the past, a monument to the interconnected, disconnected murmuring of people trying to find a place, trying to invite the deaf and the blind to watch and listen. And the gravestones are already popping up from this once fertile land. How long ago did you delete that Myspace account? Or is it still there, echoing in silence from the past?²
     Why, I wonder, do we all do it? What is it you, dear reader, explorer and stranger, want from your blogs and your tumblrs and your little corners of little spaces in the big rooms of a big house? And who will be the Van Goghs in a hundred years? Which of the disembodied voices in this graveyard of mutters will be drawn out and put on display beside their work, like the glass-encased love letters of old poets? Will it be the ones that muttered loudest, longest or proudest? Will it be the ones that muttered sweetest? Or will all this muttering fall behind as the cacophony surges on, and, as always before, only the art remains?

¹ I once tried being a 'whathaveyou'. It didn't work out. I didn't have enough thumbs.
² Molly Lewis got their first.