An article on the BBC notes that one blog is created ‘every second’, that more and more people are buying into the latest drug in what Gibson’s described as our consensual hallucination. I say ‘latest’ because I have a cynical regard for fads, whilst enjoying the pithy hypocrisy of engaging in them. Which, if you think about it, is at the core of being alive; forget about people telling you to ‘live authentically’, there’s no point wallowing in angst when there’s just so much to occupy our time with 
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But back to blogging. I don’t know much about it, and a self-reflexive consideration about blogging in the very medium which is being scrutinized should at least throw up some interesting questions about circularities and questions begged.
To leave those questions to one side for the moment, I’m sure we could get into the whole reciprocity implicit in the idea of ‘gift-giving’, but let’s transpose that, for a moment, onto the problematic at hand: what does a blogger share when he or she blogs? He or she shares his or her thoughts. It is sharing, basically, unless one has a private, password-protected blog. So what happens when one shares one’s thoughts? One has the expectation of another receiving or at least partaking of said thoughts. Those thoughts could range between one’s personal views about something, or one’s objective views about something - it doesn’t matter.
What matters is the very phenomenon of this sharing. One gives and one receives. But what is the expectation of one who gives? That another should receive, or more precisely, that another should welcome one’s views, personal or otherwise. Note that ‘welcoming’ does not necessarily equate to ‘agreeing’, but means, rather, that one, perhaps, emphatises with you. The reciprocity of this kind of ‘gift-giving’ is in one’s elevation from the obscure to the known. At a more general level, it would probably mean an acknowledgement by the many, the pool of bloggers, of one’s presence.
At a more fundamental level, words like “narcissism”, “self-identity” and the like would matter more. I guess in a world where “Everyone’s waiting for their chance to speak,” as Marla Singer tells our unnamed hero in “Fight Club”, a blog, a diary, a webpage is a monument of or to speech existing in the liminal space that is the internet. It’s not a bad thing, really.
I think what’s more important is the idea of “self-identity”, or rather, the projected identity of the author of a blog, webpage or such like. A blog, I think, is like that monument of speech as I said above, but it’s also as an affirmation of one’s expression of one’s self, ideal or not. In the relative anarchy of the internet, there really is no barrier to expression except when the implicit covenant of the online world is broken with the intrusion of the Real World.
With Montaigne, we can dance in our relative freedom, free to find ourselves; we might find ourselves “childish”, or “self-important”, even “arrogant”, but the ways in which we comport ourselves in this online space remains inviolable, even to (if you think about it) criticisms against the way we playfully dance from one idea to the next. When not repressed, this place really is the “palace of our minds”, our space to breathe.
Which is why I was fairly amused by this post and laughed out loud when I read the article featured in Singapore’s New Paper.
Elsewhere, another blogger, “A Moo Point”, takes apart the article, and concludes that:
- We don’t blog for the media (I’m reading it spuriously, I know)
- We blog for ourselves and not others
I’m like, “Dude, we blog for others, whether you like it or not”. Like I said before, blogs are not private, so you can’t possibly be blogging for yourself only, without, at the back of your mind, thinking about what others will be thinking when reading your blog. It’s as simple as that.
But the “lament” in that newspaper article is about as superficial as it can get: you may conclude, with Singabloodypore that, in general, people who blog about their dogs, themselves and their lives are “infantile”, but that only reveals a matter of preference. And this can only be infinitely less important than a blogger’s working-out of his or her own identity for his or herself and for others, whether we accuse each other of being narcissists or not.
Being “politicized” and/or “mature” by “accepted” definitions are categories that exist only in the minds of those who do the criticizing.
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