In which the blog itself is discussed

It seems like a requirement that I make the first post an announcement of the beginning of a new blog, even though it ought to be to obvious to any reader searching for a beginning that the earliest-dated post is where the blog started. I am a slave to convention.

I was inspired to blog again by Not Liz, who is also blogging again, in fits and starts. She says WordPress has a nicer interface, and hopes that its niceness will motivate her to write more. I hope its niceness will inspire me to write more too.

So why do I care if I write more? Why do I want myself to blog?

Answer: I think that blogging might help me keep my head on straighter. At work putting thoughts down in a text file always helps me clarify my thoughts and get more things done on my projects. Maybe writing down my thoughts on the tricky project that is my broader life will help me get more things done there too. I feel like I’ve made progress on living a better life in recent years, but my progress still comes haltingly. Perhaps writing here will help me better identify what it is I want, and making promises in this public space to go after what I want will better motivate me to do what has always been lacking in my life, that is, to take action.

I think these are pretty classic motivations for journalling, which gets me thinking about the difference between blogging and writing in a private diary or journal. I have periodically tried to start journals on paper, but they’ve never lasted long. I think we’ve all done this, which is why it is a shock when someone plausibly claims to have written in a diary “pretty much consistently for n years.” I’m going to claim, without proof, that even though the internet is littered with the carcasses of abandoned blogs, far more people have been successful at keeping a journal in blog form than on paper. Why should this be?

It seems that the possibility of a readership is what makes us better bloggers than journallers. But how weird is that? Journals are for private thoughts and feelings—why would the possibility of a public readership enhance our likelihood of continuing to write? I think it works if you are able to develop a very particular sort of readership. One workable readership would be some of your utmost intimates. If you can restrict your readership to this group, you might be fine, as these are the people with whom you are most comfortable sharing things. A problem with this group, however, could be that you might sometimes want to write about your utmost intimates, as some of our strongest feelings are about those to whom we are closest. And it might be awkward to share your feelings about these people with these people. Or you might have things to write about about yourself that you don’t want coming back to your in real life.

So is this a bit odd? We’re more likely to blog than to privately journal because of the possibility of readers, and we’re going to let anyone read our private thoughts, it would probably be our close friends, yet in the end we might not want our friends to read our thoughts. So who do we want to read our blogs?

Maybe the actual ideal readership be a devoted group of strangers, who are otherwise completely firewalled off from your life. In this case we have blog readers as therapists: your readership is a set of devoted listeners who are safe to share with, as they are not involved in your life in any other way, and hence nothing you say would come back to you. You’d get the satisfaction of knowing that someone is listening to the ventilation of your thoughts, but none of the repercussions that can sometimes come when you make your thoughts real by sharing them.

I invite everyone to read my blog. I just might have to sometimes be careful about what I say.