How in the hell do bloggers do it? I'm already cracking under the weight of my challenge to myself. I realize that most blogs are vanity projects, but even those... what aren't people doing when they are updating their blogs all the time? I've got so many irons in the fire that I barely have time to read stuff of interest, much less find time to write it up in a worthwhile format. Maybe I'm setting my bar too high or maybe I'm incapable of concise discussions. I never wanted to let this space just be my public diary, but I may have to resort to guerrilla tactics to get this challenge done right.
But I'm thinking about this blogging phenomenon. Yes, its clear that bloggers have a productive role to play in society, especially one with such a degraded public media system. But in general, what are bloggers doing? They spend a lot of time blogging, if they are any good at it. But unless they are one of the big blogs, are they accomplishing anything or just letting themselves *feel* like they are accomplishing something?
As blogging gets more and more press (although now that it has emerged as a challenger to the existing media structure, the coverage isn't as good as it used to be), more and more people are going to be doing it, or at least trying it. More and more people are going to be indulging in thought (a good thing) but spending way too much time at the computer to write it down ( a bad thing). Blogs are going to turn us into asocial soapboxes!
I dunno why I'm so fascinated by the editorial process of blogging but I can't stop analyzing what I'm doing as I work on this. The anthropologist in me won't stop looking in the mirror and extrapolating to others. Blogging takes up a lot of time for me, both in terms of how much I think about doing and think about posting and how much time I spend writing items up. Most of the blogs worth reading regularly are run by people smarter than me with better analysis to boot: do they spend less time than I do on their blogs? If so, what I am doing wrong?
So are blogs an indicator of the fracturing of society, of people more content to talk to themselves on the internet than get out in the real world and socialize with others? Are we losing our sociality, or is there something even more subversive here as we shift our sociality into the virtual world, essentially submitting ourselves to the next wave of evolutionary development in Earthside intelligence? Will historians millennia hence identify widespread blogging as an indicator of a society with too much time on its hands and too many rents in the social fabric? I blog because I live in a foreign country with no compatriots to commiserate with and few opportunities to discuss my ideas about the world outside of my family. What's everyone else's excuse? Is it because blogs are cool? Vanity? Mass media subversiveness?
Feck, I'm done with this. This introspection is just spinning my wheels and is pure hyperbole considering that only 12% of the world (although 2/3 of North America) are even online and only a small fraction have active blogs. Even if this theory is accurate, we are probably far from the critical mass. Feel free to contribute by starting your own blog or at least commenting on mine. I am interested to know how much time others spend on their blogs though. My friends on the PolySciFi blog seem to put up a fair amount of material between the three of them with a nice balance of links and commentary. I like it.
Posted by Nutrimentia at March 5, 2005 11:59 AM | TrackBack