blogging your heart out?
I am not sure what I feel about blogs. I mean this is an absolutely ridiculous statement to make about 4 months after starting one, but it's unfortunately true. I am meditating on the whole phenomenon of "blogging".
Is the blog a diary? But aren't diaries private and record things for our eyes alone? In fact one is generally mortified about someone actually finding the diary and reading it. One even gives strict instructions to a close friend - "please burn my diaries when I die, *without* reading them". One doesn't really write a diary and go waving it around and say "hey read this" to everyone passing by. You don't wave your personal life and information to passing strangers, or do you?
Don't many blogs seem to be diaries? That's what is puzzling. Why are we writing a diary for everyone to read and comment? And if everyone is commenting, it's not a diary it's a discussion board. If it's a discussion board why would you want the world to know personal stuff? I think this is all getting circular.
For instance lets say that you are waiting for your girl friend, boy friend (if you are double) or cat (if you are single) to come back after a jaunt somewhere? Why are you so hell bent on telling the world that you are just waiting for that great hot night, or cuddle and smooch (erm yes ofcourse cats don't smooch - I suppose they just swipe and loop around you with a throaty "Mrrrrrrrr")
And then there are personal things that no one needs to know. What does it matter to the rest of the world if I had a wonderful Korean meal last night, with lots of spice, got inebriated and had an outrageous flirtation with the waitress or waiter of the restuarant. (No I didn't really do that - that was just an example of "blog material").
I just worry about the entire world becoming a gut spilling venture where everyone peers into everybody's life (laid out colourfully in detail complete with pictures too).
I think its a trend - the talk show culture - where everything is public material. One discusses ones marital problems, family affairs, parental mess ups, sex lives, in front of a tv audience. I mean it makes me quiver with horror. Is there nothing sacred or personal anymore?
I am not sure if what is happening is a depersonalisation of ourselves by making it all public. Surely privacy in somethings is a good thing. Don't somethings deserve the sanctity of privacy? What I felt about the return of a long absent lover - that's deeply personal - something meant "for my eyes and hers/his". And surely some things are trivia. Like the details of the Korean meal.
On the other hand its good to have somethings up on a public space. I worry a bit about all the blogs out in cyberspace filled with trivia which all of us are busy wading through with some sort of voyeuristic pleasure of having a look into someone's life.
:S I dunno.
6 Comments:
Sorry to hear you didn't
have a wonderful Korean meal last night, with lots of spice, get inebriated, or have an outrageous flirtation with the waitress or waiter of the restuarant.
Or did you mean that you hadn't done ALL THREE of those? In which case, what was the missing link? Were you sober, or was the meal not actually Korean?
But remember - nobody is MAKING you blog about any of this. You don't HAVE to say :-)
I have a good imagination!
Yum.
:/ Welllll. Nobody is making me. I was just pondering the general phenomenon of blogs. I wasn't worried about anyone making me blog anything, but the trend of it all.
Nobody makes me do anything ;)
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Your entire blog-site is super. I have a hypothesis that we-are-what-we-blog. Extrapolate my first statement....
About this particular topic, I think that a blog turns into a mega-public-diary when we feel lonely and isolated. Don't you think society - particularly the western world, and those western parts of Asia and Africa, while taking on noble western values of individuality, freedom of expression, being and beliefs, and all the rest of that package, it grows increasingly nihilistic, increasingly despondent, increasingly sick in the head?
Internet to a huge extent has been I feel, a super answer to this. We can be in contact with far away friends 24 hours a day (even obsessively-compulsively!) on email, messenger, and now skype and webcams. I think "diary-blogs" take that a little further. The loneliness and solitariness we feel waiting for a lover (or cat), the fun we have (intoxication, fed on Asian food, seduction of the food-place employees) sometimes are made to feel have been more fun or less alone, than having done it all alone and nobody knowing about it.
Going further - don't you sometimes enjoy sharing very trivial details of your life with a lover? I confess I do. Every evening a primary question I ask her is: what did you have for lunch and who did you have it with? (Pathetic I know, yet she loves food, and it it is in some way important to me to know - maybe it gives me a peg in starting to know how her day was).
Rambling I know, but my point is this. I feel that blogs sort of give people a feeling that when there are others, even strangers knowing about the intimate details of their lives, it makes them that much more connected, that much less lonely, and that much closer to feeling human again. I suppose this can be especially true for those who don't have either cats or lovers.
One more thing. I think that it is incredibly boring to write in a diary no one else reads. Am I a narcisist? Possible....hmmm.....
I agree with you Phoenix.
In real life it is quite delightful that someone asks a lover the trivia of their day...I am sure "she" definitely loves you asking. At the end of the day love is built on the little everyday things and the mundane and how you share it.
My issue with the blogs I suppose is a general vague feeling that, as you point out, it can substitute for real relationships. I mean it's great to be connected to a huge community and have conversations, but for some it is the only proper relationships they have. And worryingly for an introvert it can just mean that they don't bother to go out and make real ones.
I think internet has a very paradoxical effect. Especially msn, email, blogs etc. You go home at the end of the day. If you are a loner with no real friends - you assume you have "company" via the internet. Paradoxically if you are someone who has a lot of friends you go home and get online and assume this is your "time alone" and "solitude" and don't realise it's really not.
For the former it can be a sad substitute for seeking out real relationships which at the end of the day are far more "difficult" to negotiate, less "exciting" in terms of newness, yet somehow far more rewarding in terms of love and intimacy.
For the latter it can become detrimental by constantly bombarding you with connections that become addictive in the end. I am not even sure that these constant, instant connections can damage serious and "real" relationships which are far more "messy" and demanding of one.
So it feels a dilemma.
Also as I said I worry about the boundaries between the personal and public that are always being increasingly breached.
Some people blog for lack of personl space and privacy. As paradoxical as it may sound, an obscure corner of the web may be the best or, perhaps ,the only option available to some to hear/read themselves think, to purge some of thr pent up feeling, be it happiness or stress . To them, opinions or comments are not important. What is important is that none of the unfeeling people they know will find their post. They cannot laugh at, or pass a judgement on the thoughts and feelings that are so important to the author. In the crowd, the web provide privacy and obscurity .
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