I read an interesting article this morning from the New York Times Magazine by Emily Gould, a former Gawker editor, about her experiences with blogging.
She gave an honest look at what she liked and disliked about blogging, how it affected her relationship with a boyfriend who was in an important way Gould's polar opposite. He "went out of his way to keep his online presence minimal."
But as somebody who read neither Emily Magazine (her personal blog) nor Gawker (where she'd worked), it was her comments about why people (and she herself) blog which got me thinking:
I think most people who maintain blogs are doing it for some of the same reasons I do: they like the idea that there's a place where a record of their existence is kept -- a house with an always-open door where people who are looking for you can check on you, compare notes with you and tell you what they think of you. Sometimes that house is messy, sometimes horrifyingly so. In real life, we wouldn't invite any passing stranger into these situations, but the remove of the Internet makes it seem O.K.
Personally, my blogging habits have changed. I used to obsessively journal publicly. I have a LiveJournal that will be six years old tomorrow. For a long time, I tended to make multiple posts there each day. An "unjournaled" day was almost unheard of. But for the last year or so, my LJ has gone largely gone silent.
Some of that has been changes in my life. I'm no longer a single guy, with little life outside of work, who would write on the Internet because I needed to be noticed and listened to, and because I wanted a place where I could hope for honest, but supportive, feedback. It was a place where I could be honestly myself, without worry about my reputation or those around me. I took great care to ensure that, where I had complaints about a person, I tried to make that person impossible to identify. I even used different levels of security for posts, hiding work-related posts from the public, as well as from those trusted users who lived nearby.
The biggest part of that was finding a relationship where I could be honest, and I've been blessed to find that and to look forward to marrying that special woman.
But, given that I have this blog, it's obvious that the desire to share my thoughts has not completely disappeared. (But the fact that my last post is more than a month old also tells you something.)
I'm not sure why I blog. And Gould talked about a blogger's motivation:
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn't realize was that those ideas and that urgency -- and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head -- could just disappear.
And I don't know whether I'm just trying to be a blogger when I'm not, or just trying to be a different type of blogger than I really am. But for now, I'll just recommend the article and then pose one question:
Why do you blog?
So... as promised, I responded to your question here. I'm not entirely sure it's a good answer, but it's as good as it will get for now. :-)
Hugs,
warriormare
Well, it's better than I've come up with yet for myself.
The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible. What I didn't realize was that those ideas and that urgency -- and the sense of self-importance that made me think anyone would be interested in hearing what went on in my head -- could just disappear. moncler coats