The Blogger's Dilemma

Come out of things unsaid, shoot an apple off my head

There once was a time when the term "blog" hadn't yet entered into the lexicon of the Internet. There were sites like Diary-X, Digital Expressions, xanga, and of course, LiveJournal. You couldn't really define what these places were in as much as they weren't places you could think of in terms of broad, sweeping generalizations. Some of them were just places where people would just keep a diary of the ordinary events of their everyday lives; some mundane ("...went to the mall with such-and-such today, and saw a really nice [insert item here]"), some...not so mundane ("I found out today that I'm pregnant. How will I tell my parents?"). But regardless of the gravity of what they were saying, there was a total lacking of any general formality with these things. People just posted up whatever they felt like posting, whether it was a random rambling about a boy they met, brooding reflections about dismal romantic prospects (or the total lack thereof), or, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, was an act of "opening up your window and making love to the world".


Confusion that never stops, the closing walls and the ticking clocks

Now of course, things are much different. People now talk about the "Blogosphere" in much the same way that people talked about the World Wide Web itself more than ten years ago: a vast network of people, directly or directly connected, all expressing disparate opinions, thoughts, feelings, words, ideas, and yet united by this common thread such that a resonating event would cascade throughout its members. The "what" of the reaction would be different, but the "how" and the "why" would be the same, regardless of who you were, were you were, or why you were there. It's commonality on an unprecedented scale.

And among it all, we now have bloggers who are professional bloggers...bloggers who are corporate shills...bloggers who need nothing but a soapbox to stand on. Amongst all of the new functions that a blog has come to fulfill, there seems to be a general black hole in the middle of it all, a black hole which I think has been growing ever since the explosion of the blogging phenomenon: what is the meaning of a blog?


Gonna come back and take you home/I could not stop, that you now know

A late night discussion with Renee reinforced a point she made in passing with a comment she left a while ago. Among all of the things I write about: science, religion, society...why don't I write about myself? As if somehow, I'd lost all of the meaning of what the spirit of a blog should be, that amongst my musings, I'd lost sight of the proper gestalt of blogging.

If you go back to my original place on LiveJournal, which I'll unabashedly say I still leave up only for the sake of accessing the blogs of Jennie, Renee, Karen, Naomi and LFyda, you'll see a lot of posts where I did focus on myself. And just what did I focus on?

1) Problems with girls
2) Problems with girls
3) Problems with girls

Now of course, the nature and context of those problems don't really matter; what does matter is that I'd almost invariably whine about what X said or did to Y. And it would get to a point where it was somewhat formulaic. I'd have an issue with someone, it would really sadden me, depress me, or otherwise, piss the hell out of me, I'd blog about it, there'd be some fallout from it, and I'd end up apologizing profusely. This routine wasn't so clear in some posts, but it was definitely explicit in others. And I couldn't stop. It was what I knew, and I didn't know it could be any other way. I needed an outlet, and my creative writing was stagnating, and it wasn't like I could call up Katherine and bitch and moan about my life to her for the umpteenth time.

Which leads me to my fundamental question, which I asked Renee herself the other night. At what point does a blog turn from a means of self-expression to a means of self-indulgence?


Singing come out upon my seas/Cursed missed opportunities

I've come to know and learn a lot about blogging in my time on the Internet. I've learned that no matter how anonymous or cryptic you think you are, there's always someone watching you who will almost invariably take offence at whatever you have to say, be it something political or something personal. And it should be self-evident, I know, but like my earlier little rant on labelling people, sometimes things are so painfully obvious that we don't know it's there until reality decides to ultimately clue us in.

I tried my hand at self-expression, and plainly speaking, I realized that self-expression all too easily leads to self-indulgence. Perhaps ranting on and on about the failings of my personal life doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but it presents a bad face, of myself not only to the people I know but to the people I don't know. Better to offend someone based on an insightful and semi-intelligent view on politics, religion and society than to offend someone by making them think I'm Yet Another Emo Kid.


Am I part of the cure, or am I part of the disease?

And that's what I mean by "self-indulgence". The realization that you could all too easily turn a post asking for advice on a personal problem into an emotional and verbal Vomitorium. I don't like people who emotionally barf all over others at the slightest chance as much as the next guy (and admittedly, I realize I've been guilty of that particular sin more times than I can count), so it's only fair to expect myself to not do that. In fact, it's only fair to hold myself to a higher standard - a standard that states that there's more to me than the sum total of my depression, bitterness and loneliness, and the disappointment I have in myself. That there actually is something of value swimming around in the thick soup of grey matter in my head. Because ultimately, who really cares about that? in the greater scheme of things, I've seen that my own problems are really quite petty compared to those of others. And compared to the problems out in the world in general, they're infinitesimally insignificant.

And that ultimately may be the point. Perhaps the meaning of the blog has changed to the point where it no longer means what it was thought to mean. It has for me at least. Perhaps it signals more of a regression on my part through a renewed focus on the internalization of my problems; a harmful strategy, to be sure. But this much I know for sure: it's nothing that I know that anyone else around me can complain about. I think that having one less thing in my life to have my friends complain about counts for something, at least.