So, I was reading Citizen of the Month, checking out his links page and was overwhelmed at the gazillion people out there blogging (update: he’s cut the list in half). Not that this hadn’t occurred to me years ago. Because it had. And I became obsessed with wanting my own blog until I realized I had nothing to say or too much to say. At any rate, years passed and I eventually became a blogger. But there always was and always will be a fine line between exposing what I think is “interesting” and going overboard–
Example of going overboard: I was telling my sister-in-law last night that I had it in me a while ago to publish my diaries from the divorce. When I started transcribing them though, the reading was tedious. I came off as sounding uglier than the ex. Here’s this pathetic woman allowing her husband to do the stupidest shit and instead of taking action, all she does is bitch about it. And to make matters worse, she hasn’t a shred of dignity left and ends up sleeping with him as a means of shutting him up. And she writes: “it’s all for the kids. Keep it together for the kids.” Then there was my mother on my case, saying, “what are you adding to the world by writing something like that?” and “what will the children think when they read that some day?”
Needless to say,…I gave up the divorce journals, and the blogging.
There is something so self-serving about blogging. Don’t think I don’t know what’s going on. I feel the egocentrism oozing from my skin sometimes. I’m privy to certain people’s judgments about bearing my soul on places like facebook and myspace. And quite frankly, the attention some people seek in their blatant “LOOK AT ME” status updates is quite ugly. Who’s paying attention anyway? Who reads this shit? Jason said it rather aptly in Are We Not Bloggers? that blogging is “really just an existential engagement with the void.” Brilliant.
Thing is, I love the written word. I love to write. I write on napkins at restaurants. I write on public restroom walls. I write a million emails a day. And I have written in a journal since age eleven. I have 97 hard-bound volumes that line the bookshelves of my office like doctor’s reference manuals. Writing is a part of me. Keeps me real. Keeps me raw. Whether readers pay attention or not. I mean, just as we all have that seed of hope in us for years that some day we just might become famous or rich, I think we all want to be heard and understood. And that’s the trick of blogging. You can almost imagine that you’re famous (unless of course you keep track of your daily hit count– ouch!).
The other motivation, for me, at least, is exposure. I’m like a verbal nudist. I like the freedom and airy irresponsibility of the confession. I can’t tell you how often I come across friends of mine that say things like, “John and Mary have the perfect marriage.” And i think, bullshit. John probably wears women’s pantyhose and Mary is anorexic because John is a control-freak. Their kids have A.D.D. and they both had to tap into John’s 401K because Mary is a shopaholic. People are so disturbingly into protecting their perfect identities and looking good that when something does go wrong (and it does), the amount of shame and humiliation is enough to bury them. I’m not talking about airing one’s dirty laundry. I’m talking about being real.
There was a point to this. And the point is– whether blogging is self-serving or not, so be it. I’m not going to change. I love reading other people’s secrets. I’m glad there are a million people out there doing it. It goes to show not how egocentric people are, but rather, how we all need to reach out and touch others. There’s no shame in that. I am drawn to confessions. And i love sharing in the commitment people undertake to expose themselves to the world. It’s not so much for attention, as it is a manner in which to communicate. It is not so much egocentric, as it is a belief in oneself that his or her words have impact. It is a way in which so many people try to connect. Try to feel alive. It’s why Dante wrote his Inferno, why da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa. Why my ex has tattoos. And G wears his hair in a ponytail. It’s why the tiger lily is so f’ing orange. Because inside we are not empty.
I think you hit on the point at the end. Rather than seeing this confessional blogging as self-serving and ugly egocentric behavior, I prefer to see it as people trying to connect, even if in the long run, it is unhealthy for the individual to be so “open” to strangers. With so many bloggers using their blogs primarily as promotional or selling something, I there is something anachronistic now about the tell-all-blog, and to me, it touches me emotional. It is a human connection, not a consumer one. That said, I will bring up the unhealthy part of the equation again. There is a fine line between writing and using your blog as self-therapy, and we each need to watch that we don’t escape into this virtual world at the expense of dealing with the real one.
When Marion first mentioned the idea of blogging, I was ambivalent. I think it was because of some of the questions that have been raised in recent posts—Why are we blogging? What are we communicating? Is this format actually the best way to express whatever it is we feel we must express? But there was something else too. I can’t say that talking amongst ourselves and sharing our thoughts is bad idea and I can’t offer a superior alternative, so I wasn’t exactly sure how to explain my reticence.
I’m nearing the end of my first semester in library school, so I am often thinking about the importance of advocating free access to information. In that sense, blogs are quite liberating in that there is no filter between the creator of the information and the reader of the information. At the same time, they contribute to the noise on the Internet and we are left on our own to adjust the gain.
How do we benefit from the blogs we read? Are we staying in touch? Learning valuable information? Being entertained? Wasting time? Probably all of these things, but I’m not sure that we always take a step back and think about why we are reading these posts. Or why we are posting these things in a public forum. Sometimes I think we just do things because they are there. In my MLS classes I’m constantly encouraged to get involved in Web 2.0 applications. Get a Facebook page! Join Delicious! Read and comment on blogs! I’m warned that if I don’t do these things I’ll be left behind, but a deeper analysis of what it means to participate (and rely) on these services and to move more and more of one’s life online is never discussed. One who chooses not to participate is merely a slow-adopter, a Luddite, a curmudgeon. But I don’t feel that my choices are merely the results of clinging to familiarity or pure obstinance.
I write more freely when I write on paper than when I type (all of this was transcribed from paper, actually). I like unfolding old letters with my friends’ misspellings and distinctive scripts. I like getting an unsuspected phone call from an old friend instead of a friend of the friend telling me that she saw on Facebook that so-and-so is moving to Colorado. I guess I like taking the time to collect my thoughts and send them to one person rather than always working in the mass transfer of snippets of information. Also unsettling to me is that these unfiltered, juxtaposed snippets range from the highly personal (a friend told me about finding out that an acquaintance miscarried via her Facebook page) or the highly mundane (“I’m eating tacos right now!” Who gives a shit?).
I realize that these applications have a functional purpose. I can’t search my old letters for keywords—I have to spend time sorting through a pile of crap if I want to remember something specific and my phone calls don’t have transcripts, so whatever that old friend said will inevitably blur into an imprecise memory. And it can be exciting and useful to see what my friends in other countries are up to. Maybe I’m just being sentimental, but I do mourn the loss of these “old” types of communication. Sometimes I feel that in our desire to “stay connected” we are really drifting away. Since my grandmother’s death in 2007, my letter-writing has almost entirely ground to a halt. No one else will follow through with it. Put it in an email; post it on a blog. But it’s not the same. I just can’t get as excited about this ethereal archive.
Neil: Thanks for your comments- as always, I appreciate.
Lindsay: You make some great points, but I have to say I disagree with you on several point. I still hand write in a journal every morning. I have over 100 journals and I’ll never give that up. What I do though is write in my journal and then transcribe. No biggie. it didn’t change my perspective on anything.
The other thing I tend to disagree with is that we’re suddenly “less” connected to people. I think instead we have forged many more superficial bonds with people who we normally would not be friends with. But the people in our lives with whom we are closest are still (or should be) at the same level of communication as they’ve always been. In fact, some of the people I love who were very bad letter writers 10-15 years ago are still bad facebookers, and yet, THANK GOD for facebook and email or else I would have lost them altogether.
I think it’s unreasonable when we glamorize the past, save for reasons of nostalgia or art. Like goths who glamorize the dark ages, Or Civil War re-enactors who glamorize the 1800’s. I particularly love the turn-of-the-century era and the 1920’s. But it took those folks 13 days to go from NYC to LA (what I can do in 5). Do I wish for that kind of harder life back? Sure. Sometimes. I’m sure I could live off the land for a good month or two. As long as I could take my laptop with me and blog about it!
Sing it, sister. I love this.
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