Why do we blog? I've been doing on-line journals for years now. I even wrote a primitive publishing system in Perl years ago, long before anyone knew what an 'blog' was. Before that there was raw HTML editing and the mysterious arts of FTP and Telnet. To be sure the state of Internet self-publishing has gotten easier, yet the question remains. Why do we do it?
For myself I've always been a writer. Trained from middle school to excel at the short subject theme paper the art of blogging seems to fit well with the tasks of the middle and high school English student. It's more than that though. Prior to the advent of computers and the Internet people may have kept journals, private ones. They may have written stories that may or may not have been published, but in general there wasn't this proliferation of public exposition.
Perhaps we talked more back then. Hung out more, had more leisure time to spend with friends and family. I've often thought that the digital age is a lonely endeavor. We sit in front of computer monitors with little interaction with those around us or in our community. The pace of life is faster it seems, so we end up writing form letters to publish to the world.
No, perhaps that's just me. I am a rather curmudgeonly recluse. Perhaps the explosion of blogging is the result of the introverts of the world finally finding an outlet that they can utilize without having to endure the social dance of real live human contact. Maybe. Perhaps we're all just technological narcissists that get a thrill from spewing our ideas, our thoughts, on an unsuspecting public.
I think though that the common refrain, among the kitty bloggers, the politico bloggers, the geek bloggers, the family bloggers, all of us, is the desire for community. It's part of the reason that places like Slashdot, Kuro5hin, dailyKOS or Plastic.com (yes even Little Green Footballs and Tacitus) are like computerized crack. We want to make a connection. We want to interact with someone on an intellectual level.
The Internet and the Blogosphere are wonderful freeing melting pots. Sure there are righty blogs, lefty blogs, techoblogs, snobby blogs, but in so many ways the blogosphere is color blind. There are no traditional social hang ups in the blogosphere. It doesn't matter if you're a 50 something mother of two writing about liberal issues, or a 16 year old geek railing against the world that you see as unjust. In the end, who's to know who is the 50 something and who is the 16 year old?
It's this attraction to intelligence disassociated from physical social cues that is perhaps most freeing. The desire to connect on an intellectual level, something that can be at the same time deeper, yet shallower than a connection in meat space. There is, and probably always will be, a large dollop of narssissism thrown in the mix. But when you ask anyone that blogs why they do it I would bet that the reason they give ultimately boils down to connecting with other people.
It makes me wonder what has happened to our society that people are afraid to voice strong opinions in mixed company. Perhaps it has always been this way and I have been naive. We don't seem to talk about what matters in 'the real world' anymore, if we ever really did. Abortion, Civil Rights, Love, God, anything that could make someone uncomfortable in casual company are fodder for blogs.
Is this to be just another evolution of the digital age? Since it's birth people have lauded the Internet as a great community, a village square writ large, where people could exchange ideas freely almost at the speed of thought. It is a great sharing of knowledge and community. Are we realizing more and more of this potential that lies before us? Or are we reaching out from the safe cocoons that we have built around ourselves to cope with an ever accelerating lifestyle? Are we reaching for what our parents and grandparents enjoyed without the aid of technology, with little more than a cup of coffee or a malt in a shop that didn't care if the kids hung out there all night?
I'm not sure of an exact answer. I do know that the people and ideas I have met on-line are worth more to me than the relatively narrow range of ideas I am exposed to in everyday life. Perhaps it is my acute introversion that deprives me of these things on the stage of the everyday. For one I am glad that there is a method to touch other people, to know community, even if it is from afar.