To Blog, or Not to Blog?
Your technologically–challenged neighbor does it now. Your personal trainer does it. Your babysister, your local video store clerk, your fifteen–year–old nephew and even your grandfather’s new girlfriend do it. Naturally, you ask yourself if you should too.
But the first order of business before you decide to embark on your endeavor: do you know what a blog really is? Sure you can ask around. Get those meddling and overbearing self–proclaimed experts involved. Why bother, however, when you have direct access to the magic mirror? Google is rapidly replacing libraries, schools, and—quite possibly—our minds. You can choose to flow with the high–speed traffic of the information highway, or stand still and become a cyber roadkill. Unfortunately, this is where diversity equals trouble and the mirror starts playing tricks on you. The expert advice you are seeking comes buried deep in piles of crap you have dig in to sort out. There are as many opinions on the subject as there are bloggers and non-bloggers combined.
For many a blog is nothing more than an online version of your high school bestie Sheila's diary. Sure they carry a few similarities: they both have to be updated somewhat regularly; they are both chronological; they are both a subjective view on the world. But here’s where these two grow vastly apart: the intended audience. Sheila’s diary was meant for the audience of one—Sheila herself. And you still very vividly remember how she reacted to her book of secrets being stolen and read to the “the entire world” of about ten people. A blog, on the other hand, is intended for anyone with an internet connection and a willingness to spend a few minutes of their ever–so–shrinking free time on your twaddle.
Some think a blog is just a backward-chronological record of your opinions. However, your opinions (like your tampons) are for your own use only. So if they cannot be contained in your head, they can stay as local as your laptop’s hard drive, or… your diary. And if you are one of the Kardashian sisters and have a delusion that your opinions are important to all of us regular mortals, stick to Twitter and don’t exhaust your pretty little brain by typing more than 140 characters at a time.
There are hundreds of ideas and, the truth of the matter is, none of them are wrong. The Internet is a place of true democracy (unless you live in China, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia). You are entitled to make your blog whatever you wish. I’ve seen blogs about how people hate cats; how much some despise all of the races of the world except for—or even including—their own; blogs about insect-loving; blogs about niche hobbies and activities. No matter how brilliant, humane, or sick and twisted you are, you’ll be surprised to find that you are not all that unique. You’ll have friends and followers, fellow bloggers and competitors, your own constituency and an army of enemies.
I see a blog as more of a conversation. As single–directional as it may seem at first, it invites reason and comments. It is your own real-time interactive column in the world’s largest publication called The Web. It is a job every aspiring young writer has dreamt of. Rendering total freedom of subject as broad as your imagination. Absolute flexibility of work hours. Location determined by your own whim, and an audience limited only to the total population of the planet Earth. Best (or worst) editor in chief imaginable appointed by—and most likely, being—you. You’ve been given the possibilities that William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mark Twain, James Joyce, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway couldn’t even deem feasible.
The very reason you’re even thinking whether or not to do it is that you can’t help but write, or call out to those like-minded brothers and sisters scattered around the world. Just like you can’t help but breathe the air around you regardless of its level of purity or pollution.
So, the answer, my dear friend, is: blog. Blog your fingertips away. Write daily even if most of your work never survives your own fierce and ruthless Kafkaesque censorship. If it never gets to see the light (of the computer screen) by becoming a blog piece. It is your world, and the world is yours. Build and expand it as you wish. And maybe our parallel worlds will one day intersect.