Weblog
Not very many of my friends blog. Through Google Reader, I’m subscribed to more than seventy feeds. Between fifty and sixty of those feeds are served by blogs, and of those, there are only about five blogs that belong to people I know personally. And only one of those five belongs to someone I knew in college.
What’s the deal? You’d think there be a ton of us twenty-somethings, loquaciously pontificating the spirit of our youthful sophistication and intellect every night at two in the morning. Given that we were teens when blogs made their debut, you’d think we would be the most active age group in the blogging realm. And yet, right now, I feel like this one guy, with the one blog, floating tenuously in the interstitial continuum between a blogging universe and a crowd of anonymous consumers and readers. “Lurkers” as they are often called.
Where my bloggers at?!
The truth of the matter of course is that there are plenty of bloggers in my age group; I think it is only coincidence that most of my friends just choose not to participate in what is really a shameless form of self-promotion. For people who enjoy making websites, blogging can also be considered an exercise in creativity or design or programming, but at a basic level, as bloggers, we all share a distinctly assertive role in the social space. We’re all just out there in the open, expressing feelings or opinions and saying what we want to say, and there’s a reason that we choose to do it in the public domain. There’s no equivocating there.
About half of the blogs I read belong to professionals in their late twenties to late thirties, and most of them are employed in technical or design industries. They’re all very good about making their blogs clean, accessible, and standards-compliant, and I’ve tried in some ways to follow suit. Most of the popular bloggers attract an unbelievable readership, and the discussions that evolve through comments and pingbacks are almost as noteworthy and valuable as the articles themselves.
There’s great value to be found in relationships and interactions like these, and it probably impresses me so much because I’m so used to seeing my peers throw meaningless eProps at each other or write ten-word messages on each others’ Facebook walls in broken, first grade English. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; casual socializing has its place. I just think there’s a whole host of little online communities and social networks elsewhere on the Web that offer a more controlled environment for focused discussions and information exchange. And people don’t see them.
Maybe Facebook has started to eliminate some people’s desire to maintain a personal blog. It is, after all, very good at centralizing everything. Whatever the case, I’d like to encourage people, if I in fact could, to give blogging a try or at least get out there and contribute to a blog that relates to something of personal interest. Even if Facebook Notes are more than you could ever want, I have to stand my ground and maintain that sometimes, Facebook just isn’t the right place.
It’s a big Web out there. Make it yours.
Reader Comments (11)
steph said:
20 July 2007, 2:37 PM
i totally agree! i don’t think i could ever get used to the idea of posting notes on facebook. although my blog definitely is not as “professional” as a lot of people’s…=P. do you ever wonder about how old you’ll be before you stop writing in a blog, or if that will ever happen?
zhiwan said:
20 July 2007, 3:03 PM
I am a lurker
Alex said:
20 July 2007, 4:40 PM
steph said:
Funny that you should mention “professionalism”. I should have stressed that a quality blog doesn’t necessarily have to look all pretty and fresh. Besides, there are plenty of designers out there making themes for free, public use. Personally, I plan to be blogging on my deathbed. It isn’t a huge part of my life, but I see no reason to stop.
zhiwan said:
You’re also a noob.
me said:
23 July 2007, 1:03 PM
it’s true that many people blog.. why do some do and others dont? for many who don’t it could just be lack of time. opportunity cost and shit. and then for others, i think
blogging lends itself to a certain amount of responsibility on behalf of the blogger, which i think some people are afraid of. blogging in a sense assumes a role of taking ownership for the
thoughts, feelings, and observations put forth. once words are out in the open and in concrete form through this kind of medium… they can’t be taken back. that’s why i think the blogging arena attracts those who feel comfortable carrying the weight of their words with them onto such a public space. this comfortableness can stem from various sources… some people express their opinion because they think it matters.. or some people are attention whores. stoicism also rears its head. and then i feel there are some who just don’t think that their blogs will be read; hence they feel more at ease speaking/writing with lesser inhibition (however they probably deep down secretly know&/wish that someone, somewhere out there is reading). and then there are other kind of people, of course.
that’s my take
Alex said:
23 July 2007, 7:40 PM
Yep, you’re right on most accounts, but you also seem to argue the following.
It’s close, but it doesn’t seem right. I don’t enjoy blogging because it requires that I take ownership of my words in a public space. Whether I’m comfortable with that responsibility or not, it isn’t as much of a motivator as is, say, being able to broadcast quickly to a wider audience or reason in a controlled environment. You’re more on the mark about social inhibition and anonymity allowing bloggers to speak more freely than in other circumstances, but the question wasn’t why people blog. It’s why then don’t.
The fear of taking ownership of your own words is pretty convincing, and I agree with you there. But then, and I’m just wondering out loud here, why don’t people blog under a pen name if they fear the attribution of contentious beliefs to their identity? Screen names and online handles are pretty common everywhere else on the Web, and it isn’t hard to see that people are willing to say and do all sorts of things as long as their identity is concealed. It seems that blogging requires a little something extra on the part of the blogger.
I guess you’re right. A lot of people just don’t have the time. Too many video games to play and TV shows to watch.
Mas said:
25 July 2007, 12:41 PM
I agree that there aren’t many bloggers around our group of friends. I used to blog on xanga way back in the day…(yah..xanga. lol) I didn’t feel as tho enough people were reading it to really make it worth my time. I guess I was an uninteresting person. O well. I’ve only myself to blame for that. Sometimes I write a note or two on facebook tho. At least then, there’s a possibility that someone would read it.
Xanga was also ugly. I didn’t take the time to make it nice or anything, and it seemed like too much effort.
Either way, it came down to did I have enough time and patience to write something, and did I want people to know what I’ve been upto? Call me lazy but it seems like a lot of work to try to get a lot of readers and commenters by going out to others’ sites and reading their blogs and commenting on their stuff.
Alex said:
25 July 2007, 9:37 PM
Mas said:
LOL. Way to put yourself down, man. Anyway, even if you don’t get as many people visiting your blog, you can be more confident that the people who do visit are more likely to be the people who care about what you have to say.
Mas said:
You got that right. Xanga’s make me vomit. Is that mean? That’s mean.
You seem to be treating the readership role as an obligation… as if you aren’t motivated simply by intellectual curiosity. You should be contributing to other people’s blogs because the discussion interests you. I don’t hold it against you at all if you just don’t care about what someone has to say.
Rodney said:
25 July 2007, 10:07 PM
Oh yeah, I was supposed to be buying a domain name and working on a real website. Oops..uh..I’ll get around to it..sometime…
On a different note, another thought that’s entered my head lately related to blogging is how image-conscious my employer is. Someone on the floor below me was fired last year for whining about her work situation on Xanga (I think it was Xanga, not sure). Not that this is going to stop be from blogging (laziness will do a much more effective job of doing that), but it’s something at the back of my mind.
Alex said:
25 July 2007, 10:17 PM
Mmm, people getting fired because they whine about work constitutes a more general fault in my opinion: resorting to the blog as an outlet of unconstructive frustration and anguish. You can certainly bring personal matters to the table, but it’s probably not a good idea to just bitch and whine about, say, co-workers.
me said:
28 July 2007, 1:21 AM
been out of pocket but wanted to respond and speak to what you said earlier– so, hmm i wasn’t saying that given A is comfortable with doing X, Y forces A to do.. etc. etc. all the aforementioned statements you had said, but rather, that people who do Y share the common characteristic of being comfortable with doing X. i do think that there are various motivators to why people blog, but i think at the heart of it bloggers share the common accord of this comfortability that i was talking about.
..where does “simonlife” come from? or what i mean to ask is, what is the story behind the name of and inception of your blog “simonlife”
Alex said:
29 July 2007, 4:02 PM
I first named my blog “TotalDistance” when I was a sophomore in high school, and a few traces of its existence can be found on the Internet Archive. In early 2002, I was inspired by a song to give it the name it carries today.