To Blog, Or Not To Blog

Let's face it: there's a weird allure to blogging, as evidenced by the fact that it encourages two significant behavioural contradictions. These are:

1. Private, introverted people happily display their innermost thoughts in a public forum; and

2. Individuals who would otherwise never keep diaries or aspire to writing careers, do so.

The first is, far and away, the more intriguing phenomenon. What compels people to bare their souls - and, more importantly, what makes them think that no-one will notice? It's common emotional sense to disregard the potential scrutiny of strangers, but in every online community I've been part of, uproar has occured when this blog or that is discovered by acquaintances of the creator. It's a strange problem: in treating their blogs as private diaries, writers feel free to criticise, complain about, badmouth, lament, mock or otherwise denigrate friends, family, co-workers, lovers and love-interests with the same implied impugnity as they would celebrities, sports teams or politicians. But the percieved protection is, in fact, utterly absent, and if a quick Google by Bored Person A of Blogger B's name reveals a treasure-trove of dirty goss, then problems will arise.

Personally, I see this as the writer's own lookout. On sites like livejournal, it's easy to make your posts private - that is, only viewable to those of whom you approve. Failing that, it's just as easy to write under an online handle (as most people do), leave your real name off the site (to prevent Googling) or - and here's the biggy - rename your friends when bitching about them, (as in whistleblower interviews). What stops people from doing this seems to be a variant of writer's conceit: the desire to have your (excellent) skills and viewpoints correctly attributed on the offchance that some passing bigwig wants to give you money. Beyond that, if you're going to blog critically about your nearest and dearest, non-anonymity seems foolish - although this isn't the general opinion of those caught. More often, the response is anger that whoever-it-was had read their private thoughts, as though the reader had broken the lock after rummaging through the proverbial sock drawer. Knowing you've found a friend's blog, runs this argument, imposes the courtesy of not actually reading it, especially if they haven't told you it's there. The boundaries of individual privacy in a global forum are, admittedly, still being decided, just as online ettiquite is still being learned, but in the interim, taking no measures to secure privacy and then bewailing the consequences seems akin to leaving your house permanently open and expecting not to be robbed.

As for bloggers themselves, the blank canvas has issued a siren-song to our kind throughout history. At the simplest level, we carve our names in trees and graffitti walls - a way of saying that we are here, and of hoping that, when we're gone, a part of us won't be. More than this, however, it's what makes us look longingly on rows of beautiful notebooks, pristine in their unsullied whiteness, and dream of putting them to use. Here lies potential, they seem to promise. With us, you can say anything. Your handwriting will be perfect. You'll always use the same pen. You'll never need to cross anything out, and when you're done, each book will resemble a work of art. And so, thus enlivened, we buy one, carried forward on a wave of creative enthusiasm - only to have our usage inevitably taper off. The ink smears; we draw doodles; we tear out pages, ramble on, write messily in a number of different colours and, all of a sudden, that weight of potentiality is gone, marred by the non-linear scramble of human thought.

But blogs - lovely blogs!- are digital. There is no mess to be made. We can edit without besmirching the look of the thing, change the colour in an ordered, mannerly fashion, put up pictures and alter the font. There is no bulk of unused paper to intimidate or demand thoughtful contribution: each blog is exactly as long as we make it. The sense of potentiality is never diminished by squalid appearance, and thus we keep writing, even if our entries are entirely banal. Which, ultimately, is the defining characteristic of the blogging era: no matter how many entries, authors, topics or sites, there's no guarantee that what's being said is worth the paper it isn't written on.