So a man walks into a blog …
(That wasn’t meaningful, but the phrase occured to me, and I wanted to use it).
Doyce raised the issue over in his blog of why those who write blogs do it. Rather than simply comment over there, I’ll comment here — since I have this damned page and can do with it as I like.
On one level the reasons are probably as varied as there are people doing it, if not moreso. But for myself, the following come to mind:
Narcissism. There’s something terribly self-important about the idea of writing one’s personal opinions and experiences and posting them out there in the Internet for the entire frickin’ global community to read. I mean, what an ego-boost. And what presumption, that one’s inner thoughts (edited to whatever degree one does) are actually worthy and entertaining enough to be so posted.
(Digression. One day when I was in 6th Grade, we got back our little packet of school pictures — the individual kind. They came, of course, with a flimsy little cardboard frame. I noticed some folks putting their 5×8 self-portrait into their frame and putting it on their desk. I thought this was amusing, so I went them one better, and put my sheet of wallet-sized shots into the frame, so that, Andy Warhol/Op-Art-like, there were several shots of me gazing outward sedately. One of the neighboring 6th Grade teachers, Mrs. Snyder, who was something of a wag and who knew me because of my zany intellectual hi-jinx with one of her students, happened to spot this and dubbed me Narcissus on the spot. She even clipped a New Yorker cartoon of Narcissus gazing into the pool, while his girlfriend asks, “Narcissus, is there someone else?” and gave it to me. Today, of course, she’d be be sued, fired, and probably tarred and feathered. At the time, it was a useful, if odd, lesson for me, not to mention an anecdote for my future blogging.)
On a more innocuous plane, it’s push communication. I could write a lot of this stuff (“How I Spent My Labor Day”) in e-mails to people. It’s simpler, in some ways, to blog it. Of course, I don’t really know if anyone (aside from a very few people) actually read this, so it may not be being pushed very far.
It’s journaling. In other words, it doesn’t matter who’s reading it, as much as that I am writing it. There’s probably some of that, but I could do it a lot more simply in another format, and without worries of who might be reading it restraining me from commentary on certain items. (It occured to me, as we were going through our Buffyfest this weekend, that Dawn ought to be journaling in a blog, with appropriate hilarity ensuing.)
Perhaps, in the long run (as Meery Berry implied in her comments to Doyce), there’s not much different between what drives one to write a blog, and what drives one to write. All of the above could apply to writing a novel, a textbook, or a poem. Or, for that matter, in a more abstract fashion, sculpting, painting, or spraying oneself with Cheeze Whiz and reading the phone book naked (made possible by a grant from the NEA). There’s the (necessary) Narcissism of believing one has something to say that is worth hearing. There’s the desire to promulgate information that can’t be sent out any other way. And there’s an element of self-therapy in working through thoughts and beliefs and ideals in another venue that offers its own opportunities (and pitfalls).
It’s worth more thought, one of these days.