Why blog?

I was thinking yesterday about why people have grown this urgent need to create blogs and put them out there for the world to see. I started thinking about what life must have been like before anyone could keep an online diary of sorts where the personal was nowhere near as public as it is these days (god, this makes me sound young- to wonder what it was like pre-internet, and not immediately have this in my recollection. yipes!).

I can relate to the idea of documenting, as people have kept traditional journals and records since the dawn of time, but this vulnerable, public version seems a bit foreign. Voyeuristic, maybe? Egotistical as well, perhaps? To both produce and consume the inner-most thoughts and tidbits of someone, sometimes a complete strangers’ every day… And to consider those bits and pieces of someone fairly random as something of great value to our daily lives.

Why do we want to know? Is it really an ego thing- are we just hoping to see ourselves reflected in the human condition of others as spat back out at us from people in other corners of the world, writing about similar things, and sharing similar experiences along with their different ones? Or are we looking for those differences to better understand each other and discover something new?

There’s this running theme in all the things I’m looking at in school, and of course life as well right now- and it’s the social aspect of humanness, and how social intelligence is extremely valuable in our culture and 21st century world. And it’s strange to see that as we try to connect with each other more and more in this progression, there’s a bizarre detachment that occurs when we put a computer screen, cellphone, blackberry, ipod, etc, between us, and literal face-time contact becomes nearly obsolete altogether.

As newspapers fold , and we find ourselves reading the daily news of peoples individual lives and experience, what does this mean for culture in the long run, I wonder.

And as for me? Why have I started this thing up? Well, I’ll be honest. I like hearing myself talk as much as the next person, and I don’t want to miss out on an experience of creation and connection either. It’s pretty normal to not want to be alone in your experiences, I think. But also it’s nice to have a sparkly clean screen full of the nice parts of your life highlighted and recorded (complete with photos!) and probably glorified a bit to hold on to while you’re around, and maybe to leave after you’ve left.

Then again, I don’t want to take myself too seriously, and I doubt that everything I may stick out here will be of significant value to anyone aside from my own little set of whims, but right now those whims are a good enough reason for me.