from Wendy
Because it's there!
Peceli and I started this blog at the suggestion of a relative, then Peceli took off to play golf four days a week!
Anyway I read some other bloggers' reasons about why they blog and I've picked out random lines from their comments about blogging. The first five lines are from me of course!
Blogging is like skating on thin ice at times
Forgetting Google’s binoculars
That will post and repost mistaken ideas
Foolish one-liners
Never forget your ‘real’ name.
I love collecting things and clippings are all over the place in different notebooks and books, and blogging just adds to this mania for collecting because blogs can be an organizer of thoughts, insights, crazy moments.
The tools are easy, easier than setting up a website. It is a diary for friends, relatives, strangers or finding an audience when no-one else will listen. The connections not local, but global and it can be a meeting of minds, different, argumentative.
We live in the age of memoir and confession. Anything goes and everyone's an audience. You don’t need to be a celebrity or a world leader to be worth listening to any more.
We have a growing sense of our own mortality. Baby boomers in mid-life are beginning to sum up, to think about what we’ve learned from life, and interested in sharing what we find. We need to make our own mark, to stand out from the crowd.
and there is a lot of tumult and anxiety.
We are looking for answers and perspective.The Pope or the mullahs or the Christian Right do not provide adequate answers I can relate to. Slowing down and meditating on the moment brings me peace and balance.
The age of the misunderstood garret dweller is over. There are others - tens of thousands or more - who are traveling the same road, asking the same questions.
We create a more richly textured and friendlier world when we connect.
It gives me a way to make sense of me and my surroundings. It acts as my spiritual practice, a kind of meditation, where I can communicate without judgement or without my inner critic taking over. Not that my inner critic doesn't have a voice.
speak through images, photographs stolen from other websites.
A way of purging and reflection, the more we see the truth, a way to release pressure, create beauty and put in concrete form, some of the things that rattle around inside me. Modern life is bruising and so fast.
I occasionally suffer from information overload and have to disconnect for awhile.
A way to parse my crazy world, to make some sense of it.
It is a marketing tool too.
We are all voyeurs. You have to have a real talent to do them, though. Not to go into the morbid details of your daily toilettes. Know when to stop.
Needing to vent about some crappy situation in my life. Bemoaning some relationship issue or now mostly, just my private thoughts about various people, places, work, books read, etc. complete strangers out in the ether.
But then, who would want to read about my mundanities and/or profundities?
Good question. Good post.
ReplyDeleteI still have difficulty with my approach to blogging. At times I want to give it up. Other times I want to do a lot more in different areas.
Part of what keeps me at it is that my mother enjoys my blog. Mom doesn't do computers, so her nurse prints it out and brings it to her when I have a new post about something I've seen or done.
I guess it is just so easy to do - to type or copy and paste in some obsession for the day!
ReplyDeleteIt is good for wintry weather so I don't know if I'll do much when summer comes.
Perhaps the newspapers will become redundant eventually if more households in the world go on-line. Some breaking news comes through blogs even before standard websites.
W.
Much much later: April 2010
ReplyDeleteA list of so-called 'subversive' blogs has been sent to Fiji government departments, writes one blogger, sent by the Fiji leaders-that-be. Some of the blogs listed are certainly not controversial and our babasiga blog is listed there also! Now our posts are mainly quite ordinary, about cultural or religious matters connected to Fiji. Politics is kept out 95% of the time. Even posted comments on our posting are checked and some deleted if there is swearing, an unreadable language, advertising, etc. It seems that the disquiet in Fiji about the media by the leaders even includes websites by named or anonymous writers.
w.