On Blogging

These keystokes represent my first tentative steps into recording my relevant and profound (OK...maybe dull) musings onto the web for world wide consumption (isn't a world wide following every blogger's fantasy??). Blogging has been around for several years and I remember laughing the first time I heard about it. What kind of ego's believe that the world cares about the cuteness of their cat or their crazy sister? I laughed... but I really was curious. Who blogs? Why do they do it? Isn't it just another chore to do between the laundry and the lawn? Where's the motivation?

I asked myself those questions back when blogs numbered in the thousands. Last week I heard that the world wide number of blogs now exceeds 100 million! It's growing exponentially.

But why...????

I'm not the first person to ask. It's actually been studied. One very good paper I've read is titled "I'm Blogging This" A Closer Look at Why People Blog. (I'm not techno-savvy enough to provide a link so you'll have to google it if you want to read it)This paper submits five reasons for the need to blog. 1)documenting one's life, 2)providing commentary and opinions, 3) working out emotional issues, 4) thinking by writing, 5) promoting conversation and community. All legitimate reasons. The paper is very well researched, written, foot noted and the conclusions make sense, but I think the data can be boiled down further and summarized into something much simpler and deeper to the human psyche.

A few years ago (was it even 10??) I watched an hour of a television drama that may have been canceled after a few episodes. I don't remember the name and I don't remember the actors but there was one scene that stayed with me. I recognized it as a very basic truth. An exhausted salesman woke up in his hotel room having slept on top of the covers and in his clothes. He was in a hurry and grabbed his bag and stood at the door looking back at his room. The bed was still made, the towels unused, the soap unopened, etc. He couldn't leave the room until he went back and pulled the covers down, threw a couple towels on the floor and ran some water in the tub. It was too sad for him to know that he was in that room for several hours but left no sign that he had ever been there. He needed to leave proof of his existence.

He needed to Matter.

Isn't that a basic primal instinct of our species? Isn't that a reason behind cave drawings in France, carved initials in the forest, and grafitti in Los Angeles? The kid in L.A. is using his spray paint for the same reason I am using my keyboard.

WE ARE AFFIRMING THAT WE EXIST. On some level we believe that what goes out onto the internet is archived and can be googled and discovered even in the next millenium. To me it feels more permanent than the initials I carved in the birch tree decades ago. If I turn my thoughts and musings into electrons and toss them into the world wide wind ... I'm just saying...


Jim was here.....