Why Blog?

Three Answers (with Helpful Labels!):
1. Social/Practical: It can help you stay in contact with friends and family.

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2. Intellectual/Artistic: It can help you develop thoughts and observations that might otherwise remain shapeless and half-formed.

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3. Psychological/Archival: It can help you notice how the world and your views about it change (or don’t change) over time.
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If I’ve learned one thing about a blog, it is that long entries can be daunting. So after writing a long answer to the question posed in the title of this post, I decided to export the highlights into a shorter, more reader-friendly post (you’ve in it right now; how’s it going?). I invite readers interested in something more than a fast-food snack answer to this question—and my motives for considering the question in the first place—to check out the multi-course sit-down dinner version below.

Why I Started Blogging, What I’ve Learned About Blogging Since I Started Blogging, Why I Continue to Blog, and Why I Hope You Will Start a Blog, Too

I got an e-mail from an old friend yesterday that read, in part: “I was thinking about your suggestion that I start a blog. Now, explain to me the reason? Do people actually read the things -- is it strictly vanity?” When I first read that e-mail, I was taken aback by the vanity theory, but after further reflection I realized that not so very long ago, I might have espoused such a theory myself. Coming out of my head, the theory might have sounded like this: “Why in the world do some people feel so compelled to tell the world what they think? Why do they think the world needs to hear what they have to say?” My own blogging story has radically altered my thinking about this question and by way of answer to old friend’s question, I’m going to tell that story (and send a link to this post in my return e-mail). But to cut to the chase a bit, let me say that I don’t blog for “the world;” I blog for a small group of people that includes my immediate family, my extended family (none of whom live nearby), and a few close friends, some of whom live nearby and some of whom don’t. And in theory at least, it’s a quid pro quo thing. I am interested in hearing what these people are thinking and doing, I know that some of them are interested in what I am thinking and doing, and so I offer a glimpse of the latter, in hopes of getting a glimpse of the former in return.

But there’s more to it than that, and I think the best way to explain how and why I think of blogging the way I do, is to tell my blog story. It goes like this: when Emilio was born, lots of people in my extended family expressed interest in seeing photos of him. Taking a roll of photos, developing them, selecting which ones to reprint, reprinting them, and then mailing them around the world was one way of responding to that interest. Because I now own a digital camera, though, I thought it might be less time-consuming to put the photos on an Emilio website, so I bought such a website. I had difficulty getting it to do what I wanted it to do, though, and as I was plotting a strategy for bending it to my will, I came across the Blogger service run by Google. I decided to try it out to see how easy it would be to make a single blog posting and discovered that it was stunningly simple.

Now, I could have stopped there and used the blog strictly as an Emilio-photo-distribution service. But as some of you well know, my default interactive mode with the world is listening, not talking, and the idea of sending reports and photos out into a vast, unresponsive webworld did not appeal to me in the least. So I thought: if I make Emilio-reporting only one part of my blogwork, maybe I can induce some other people who don’t have newborns to join me in the blogosphere. Lisa and Brian were the first people who came to mind. The three of us talk on the phone all the time, and I am always interested in hearing about the movies or TV shows they’ve enjoyed (and hated) or their thoughts about recent sporting events and basically anything going on in their lives. There are lots of other people whose thoughts I am interested in hearing about, but I suspected I would stand a better chance of getting my sister and brother to go in on this with me than I would of having anybody else. So before giving them my blog address, I asked them to go to www.blogger.com to set up a blogsite for themselves, and to my delight, they both willingly did. Not long afterwards, María José and Melissa joined us. Then my friend Jack came in. And so did my friend Gene. And in almost no time, I found that my blogworld was thick with interesting stories, comments and observations, partially provided by these folks, but also healthily supplemented by other friends (Julie, Jennifer), especially Ruth, who did not start up her own blog, but who commented on everybody else’s so often and at such length, that she might as well have. It was, in short, the Golden Age of Blog.

Now, we are in the Middle Ages. Ruth has had back surgery and can’t use her computer. Gene has gone to Mexico and doesn’t have access to the internet. Jack and María José and Melissa and Lisa are still blogging (and commenting), but not as frequently as they once did. And Brian and I both have seen our flames flicker from time to time. I have tried to recruit other people to join us in the blogworld, and Emilio’s grandmothers have recently become more active presences. But there have also been plenty of times when my posts have received no comments at all and I’ve found myself wondering if I have, in fact, ended up sending out reports and photos out a vast, unresponsive webworld, as I originally feared. At such times, I have sometimes thought: When the world has time for 10% of you, is it better to give them 8% or 15%? I know that sometimes people read my blog and don’t leave a comment because either a) they can’t think of something to say; or b) they don’t want to be bothered by the technology (I guess you have to register to respond?). I understand that. As I said earlier, my default mode is listening, not talking. And I don’t like having my name registered on the Internet anymore than I have to. Maybe, too, some readers think I am writing for another audience and don’t think it’s their input that I’m after. But let me assure you: in a vast, unresponsive webworld, all comments are welcome. And in my experience, the more comments I get, the more I like it. And even if you don’t think you are my target audience, I would still like to know who is in my audience.

I have also come to realize, however, that I will keep putting out the Emilio Report even if I don’t get another comment because, as Ruth has shown me, they'll make a nice scrapbook which Emilio may appreciate some day. I am also going to keep on plugging along with my movie reviews and sports commentary, for the moment at least, partly because I have found it to be addictive (the movie reviews, anyway), partly because I like being able to go back to see what I thought about something after I’ve forgotten what I thought about it, and partly because I’ve found that writing about things, and anticipating writing about them, enriches the way I experience them. Now, I could just write for myself and leave the blogworld out of it, but I’ve also found that an audience is a motivator (even when my audience isn’t always as responsive as I’d like it to be).