blog<\/a> 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.<\/p>\nOn 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:<\/p>\n
Narcissism<\/b>. 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 <\/i>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.<\/p>\n
(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.)<\/p>\n
On a more innocuous plane, it’s push communication<\/b>. 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.<\/p>\n
It’s journaling<\/b>. In other words, it doesn’t matter who’s reading <\/i>it, as much as that I am writing <\/i>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 Buffy<\/i>fest this weekend, that Dawn ought to be journaling in a blog, with appropriate hilarity ensuing.)<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
It’s worth more thought, one of these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4407,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2003\/09\/08\/you_win_some_yo.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":0},"title":"You win some, you lose some","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 8-Sep-03 3:17pm","format":false,"excerpt":"The bad news: pop-up ads don't violate copyright and trademark laws, even when they put one competitor's ad up over another one's. The good news: hyperlinking to copyrighted material is...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11976,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/12\/19\/more_searchy_goodness.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":1},"title":"More searchy goodness","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 19-Dec-07 11:48am","format":false,"excerpt":"I've added yet another search box to the sidebar.\u00a0 This one's powered by Google, and will search this blog, Margie's Kitchen, and Doing Write.\u00a0 The result is Google-ugly, not as...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7940,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/07\/18\/confluence_5.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":2},"title":"Confluence","author":"***Dave","date":"Mon 18-Jul-05 6:43am","format":false,"excerpt":"The biggest time-wasters at work? (Cough, cough, cough) Through a Web survey involving more than 10,000 employees, the report found that personal Internet surfing ranked as the top method of...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7260,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2005\/04\/13\/the_comment_reg.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":3},"title":"The Comment Registration Act of 2005","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 13-Apr-05 11:19am","format":false,"excerpt":"Dammit. Another burst of comment spam today. Nothing that showed up on the front page, but because the URL was innocuous (which is a bad sign of spammers getting smarter),...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8262,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2006\/01\/04\/talkin_about_fr.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":4},"title":"Talkin’ about Freedom","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 4-Jan-06 1:28am","format":false,"excerpt":"Kudos to Micro$oft for protecting their business model in China by deleting a controversial Chinese blogger's site on MSN Spaces. Wouldn't want to put all those gazillions of dollars in...","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging & Internet"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging & Internet","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":17112,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2010\/04\/13\/color-commentary-and-other-bloggy-bits.html","url_meta":{"origin":669,"position":5},"title":"Color commentary and other bloggy bits","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 13-Apr-10 3:03pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Some time back (though I can't find the comment thread where it came up), someone suggested that it would make a lot more sense if the comments by readers had a colored background, and comments by me had the same white background as the original blog entry. I finally delved\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Blogging - Technical"","block_context":{"text":"Blogging - Technical","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/blogging-technical"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/669\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}