Postcards From The Edge

There's one big difference between a blog and a diary. In a blog, you're writing for others. In a diary, you're writing for yourself. That is, if you truly believe in your diary as something private, that others should not read.

Given that a diary is, in principle, for yourself, you could write it completely incoherent, using shorthand, phrases only you'd understand. Even if you didn't because it didn't occur to you to write about and to yourself in a way that's different from the way you'd write it to others, at the very least, you might choose to write it without pretension, without trying to impress someone.

The mere act of writing down thoughts, even if private, would have to make you think "who is going to read this" and to reason that the answer is possibly, just possibly, someone else besides yourself.

On the other hand, a blog is this public thing, and the only thing that keeps it private is the indifference of others. Ask someone why they don't read a blog and he'll say "Why should I?". There's something decidedly pathetic reading someone else's blog as if you're someone who's life is even more dull than the person you're reading, or perhaps worse still, because you're a voyeur.

You want to know what the object of your affection (or derision) is thinking, or doing, or feeling, assuming they'd put that in their blog.

On the flip side, as the blogger, you might use this opportunity to impress the folks who read your blog. Ask yourself how often you've done this: write bad poetry. Talk about the angst in your life. Decide that if there's a 1 to 10 scale of how you feel your life is going, it's either 0 (the pits of the world) or 11 (mass euphoria) and occasionally 2 (blah). As you're trying to emote harder than the next person, to out-Cobain Cobain, to have the Courtney Love of your life send your life into a spiral of oblivion.

In the end, the desparing blog entry is likely to be an exaggeration of one's life. If it were really that miserable, thoughts of jumping off tall buildings or ingesting sleeping pills would cross one's mind. I'm not saying that people don't get down, but in this era where things are super-sized, emotions, writ as word are often supersized as well. And maybe it's done to, in some odd way, impress someone.

Personally, I don't get it. In a way, I do find it mildly intriguing to read a blog where rambling bits of poetry and emotion substitute for coherent thoughts and observations, in a kind of hazy sense of cool. It's a way to fish for pity, I think. I'm being completely unfair, judging blogs by their cover, but I can't really sit with the person to figure out whether they write like this because it's who they are, or who they want to be. And, to be fair, do I write like this because I want to be someone else.

And so I find myself now in the odd situation of having to think about why I blog, and how I blog. Damn those incoherent pieces of poetry! Trying to make me think!