Why do we blog?

January 20, 2008 in About ME, blogging
Tags: blogging, why people blog

Why blog? Especially if it’s “just personal”?

One of the things I wrestle with sometimes is practicality. Or rather, my creative side wrestles with my practical side.

My dad had a phrase I heard on a regular basis: “What does that have to do with the price of milk?” He hauled milk for a living, working 52 weeks of the year, 7 days a week. He also owned a fleet of trucks and had other men working for him. I doubt he ever conceived of stepping back from work just because he had other people to do things.

The world revolved around the price of milk, in Clark County, when the place had the highest number of cows per people in Wisconsin, land of dairy.

Hauling milk led to money. Blogging about my personal life leads to _______(?)

Part of my answer is “wonder”. Because the internet is important and vast like space and I can be there without a capsule or suit. For us older nerds who recall the grip paper had on writing, this instant publishing of our every thought is an absolute and powerful thrill. Once upon a time, this post would have to pass through an editor’s brain (if he would even read it) before it got to you. Like a tree that falls in the forest without being heard, it just would not exist.

I think blogging makes me feel connected and alive.

As a child, I would stay up late – always an insomniac – and listen to strange songs out of Memphis, New Orleans and Chicago. The transmission would be crystal clear late at night. Those foreign sounds of funk and jazz gave me hope that my backwater had no monopoly on culture.

Writing is less passive than reading. But certainly less active than getting out of the house and having to appear with clean, ironed clothes and shiny smiling teeth. And sometimes we connect perfectly–you and I– because we toss out these inner thoughts in a blog. That’s an elegant thing we have to respect.

Blogging can be a way to cope and distract. I can massage some sense out of the change if I tap my keyboard quickly and look – out came some things that were out of my head. Have I molded at least a sentence that some stranger will pick up through googling “blonde” or “britney”? Made ya look. I just impacted somebody, even if my post was as annoying as a mosquito in that person’s ear.

Care to let me know why you blog?