So, what’s the deal with blogging?
Seinfeld style reflections about nothing…
I just have to ask myself that sometimes…what’s the deal with blogging? Does anyone really care what I think or say? Does it even matter?
I don’t think it does.
I ran into a fellow blogger, a very intelligent woman, a home-schooler, not at all weird, her husband is a professional, and she is obviously well educated, sane, balanced, social, all that stuff to qualify as an exceptional human being, and she told me she gave up checking her comments for Lent. And it was a real sacrifice. (On Sundays in Lent she gives in.)
Is it internet addiction? Blogging addiction? Or is it just ego? What is the draw here?
I check my comments frequently…and I check other people’s blogs frequently. I check the Catholic Blogging Network for what people are currently posting. Do you realize most of us post the same stuff - the same newsworthy items or controversies? It’s kinda boring. Some people seem to like another’s format or concept and go with it on their own blog - that’s not very original. (We called them copy-cats in school.)
Granted, established blogs, famous for insider news, have great - I should say - interesting posts. (Although maybe I’m getting sick of cafeteria fare, or reading the same book, and maybe I don’t care what the prayer really says.) Other blogs link to these same blogs - I’ve done it as well - and if we are lucky, they write their own slant on the same old, same old. Other blogs write about a group - no one else knows who these people are - in their local area getting together to do something, anything - who cares? Does the world really care?
Back on topic: Why do we read other blogs? Because we like the person, or the content, or both? Or is it because someone is original, witty - funny even - informative, insightful, spiritual, intelligent - whatever - but there is some substance there to captivate our attention. There is a personality there - a light shining in the darkness as it were. It’s a challenge to accomplish that - and more often, it is just grace.
Some blogs are very personal, and because of that, they are incredibly interesting, they allow us to know a soul more deeply, and we discover something about ourselves in relationship to the person communicating with us. We rarely experience such intimacy in our face to face experience with others in daily life, it seems to be a phenomenon unique to the weblog.
But why do we write? Because we have something to say? Because we think we have something to contribute? Because we like to write? Why? Because people we don’t know respond sometimes and we think, ‘wow, that guy heard me and liked me’? Then again, maybe we are narcissists at heart and want people to notice us?
Maybe we just want to be known?
Perhaps we just have a need to be acknowledged, maybe we need our experience to be validated on some level? Maybe in our shallow, superficial and impersonal culture, we just need to express ourselves as human beings and need others to affirm that?
The blogs I read are by people who have something to say, those who educate and enlighten, or just entertain, but I connect to them somehow - and these get my comments. Others not so much. On some of the more ‘out front’ blogs, I grow weary of their content and tendency towards commercialism. A few may even have slipped from their original ‘blog award’ standards…somehow forgetting the reason they got the awards in the first place.
Yet the question persists, what’s the deal with blogging? Why do we write? And why does it seem everyone and their mother is blogging? Are there too many blogs? I’m not kidding, my MPD post was inspired by a blog I came across by people with Multiple Personality Disorder. Okay - so I’m not original - they were- although I don’t think they were pretending like I was in the post - and only one of their personalities were doing the writing.
Obviously, there is a blog for everybody. I worked with someone who was this raging Trad and now she’s become a raging Wiccan - well, not as bad as when she was Trad - that rhymes! Before she got to Wicca, she was a raging Vegan. All along she basically just raged on. Who wants to read stuff like that? For her, the blog has become one big soap box to rant from - about whatever happens to be her current obsession. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.)
Thus I have to wonder, what if blogging is just an outlet for the insane? What if we are all nuts? (Although Chesterton would probably dismiss it all as a fad.)
Methinks I post too much!
