On blogging

With the blogging scholarship competition, I have been questioning why I blog (yeah, again.) It’s really sort of an odd activity, especially when you think about it on a huge scale. I was at a talk by Chuck Klosterman once, and he asked how many people in the room blogged. Well over half raised their hands. When everyone’s blogging, how will we find the time to keep up? And why bother writing if there are so many other people doing it- don’t we risk redundancy?

I’ve been reading Ambient Findablity (2005) by Peter Morville for my reference class, and I came across a great quote that at least partially explains why I blog:

“We write, not just to communicate, but to enhance our own personal findability” (p.142).

I write partially for myself, partially for my readers- but I also write for the people who may think something similar in the future, query Google, and come across my page. I write to find like minds- and I find like mind through their writing.

Through writing, by keeping my thoughts online, I open up the possibility to converse not only on what I am thinking right now, but also what I was think of a month or a year ago. Often someone will stumble on an entry from half a year ago, leave an interesting comment, which starts an email conversation. This brings old thoughts to the surface again, and with time, I often reconsider what I’ve written.

There are downsides, to be sure. Often, what I used to think was naive, idealistic, overly cautious, or downright wrong. But by putting it all out there people can follow my thought process, they can see where I have been, what I have already worked through.

Honestly, sometimes that’s a little scary. I’m sure everyone looks at things they’ve written in the past and shuddered a little. “What was I thinking?” or, sometimes, “Why wasn’t I thinking?”

But I keep coming back to this need to communicate. The need to share ideas. You can tell from the blogging scholarship finalists that there are plenty of things to write about. It’s amazing and wonderful to see so many people writing about their passions- and it makes me so thankful to be living now, to be a part of it all.

/gushiness

back to the homework…