What? You mean promoting ideas is not all there is in this life? (kidding.)
Still, in what may be an act of cognitive dissonance, I have a rosier view of blogging.
If you've ever made use of Blogger's random blog function, you know that idea promotion is not what most people use blogging for. Rather, the overwhelming majority of blogs are family blogs. It's a way of updating people about their life without sending annoying mass emails. Here-is-what's-new, read-at-your-leisure sort of thing.
A much smaller percentage of blogs is about ideas. I have theories for why that is:
1. The reasons Stillman mentions in the article above: time, ego, and confidence. These are issues for men too, by the way.
2. Just as a lot of people don't care about the meaning of life, a lot of people don't care about ideas. I have puzzled over these creatures, and the best I can conclude is that they simply value something else, usually normality, over interestingness.
3. It's hard to blog about ideas. A disturbingly high proportion of people who start don't get very far. I think the reason why is because it takes a long time to get any semblance of a following, and it feels silly (and kind of depressing) to toss ideas to an empty abyss.
But what makes it hard is also what I find most valuable about blogging: With time, it connects you to people who care about the same ideas you do. I don't find many such people in real life, and it's comforting/relieving/thrilling to find others interested in the same topics as I am. I feel I've made a strange but genuine connection with a number of people through blogging -- people I don't really "know", but that I've come to deeply admire and respect through what I imperfectly perceive them to be.
I'll add that I think blogging would be worthwhile [for me] even if no one was reading. The reason is because writing is valuable -- it is the active thinking of the seated, to quote Mark Kingwell -- and it is made more valuable if you have the pressure of knowing that other people may read what you are thinking. The fact that nothing can be deleted from the Internet is a powerful incentive indeed. I take it as a rule of thumb that if I am not reflecting through writing regularly -- and 90% of the things I write never get blogged, by the way -- then I am living badly.
Colin Marshall twat:
The two-step of creation: (1) make your mind as interesting as possible, (2) build a gateway for others to get into your mind. (And repeat.)
To me that's all blogging is: One type of gateway that happens to be simple and free.
The alternative is to fall into the habit of passive consumption. And it's disturbingly easy to do. It's so easy to come home from work or school, pop some corn, and sink into a delightful stupor to whatever's on television tonight until it's time to go to bed and wake up and do it all again tomorrow.
And I think that is precisely why I am so fond of blogging: Because of its implicit contrast with other forms of time-spending.
