Blogception (or: A Blog Post About Blogging)

 This morning, whilst pining for school to start already so my Sundays could have a purpose again, I had the brilliant idea to start a blog to fill my time. I like creative non-fiction, I thought. This could be a good exercise in writing, I thought. Practice makes perfect, I thought. Then: blogs are for squares, I thought.

I don’t even know where it came from. Suddenly, out of nowhere, there was this criticism mulling about amidst all of the ideas and the positivity and the enthusiasm. I couldn’t even bring myself to visit the blogosphere and select a domain because I had found that—for some inexplicable reason—I was violently prejudiced against blogs.

Why?

Maybe I thought blogging was narcissistic. When somebody signs up for a blog, chooses a template, selects the option to show up in search engines, and begins writing and posting their thoughts, they are essentially saying: I am important and you should want to read what I have to say.

Really, how could anyone be so self-important as to think they’re worth my screen-time?

Instantly, I can identify about five things that are wrong with that statement, the first and foremost being the absolute hypocrisy of it. I have a Facebook page that I update daily with statuses and links. I have two Tumblrs with follower counts I’m rather pleased about to which I compulsively reblog things when I’m bored or can’t think of anything else to do. The most heinous example of hypocrisy is my Twitter account, which I also update daily about such inconsequential things as my fish (who I, incidentally, believe that everyone should know and love), oftentimes because I think the things I’m saying are clever. My success on all of these sites is measured by the number of likes, comments, reblogs, favorites, and retweets I receive. Meanwhile, 69% of bloggers surveyed in The2011 State Of The Blogosphere reported that they measure the success of their blogs by their own personal satisfaction.

Show-offs!

Granted, 70% also said they used their blogs to share their personal expertise with others. However, when asked why they blog, they didn’t seem to have the option of answering “because I find it personally fulfilling.” Plus, a great deal of those surveyed were self-employed professionals or being paid by corporations to blog (meaning they probably did have some expertise worth blogging about). These bloggers had a number of reasons for blogging, and they all seemed more reasonable than “because I want everyone to know my fish is the coolest pet on the block.”

So I’ve done a decent job of debunking my prejudice in my own mind. It seems to me that most successful blogs are worth reading. I’ve determined that the concept of feeling important enough to have something worth reading is more a product of confidence than of narcissism. So what’s my problem? I obviously think I have things worth saying! Facebook! Tumblr! Twitter!

Perhaps not. There’s a chance that I’ve overblown the significance of the aforementioned social networking sites, misinterpreting frequency of posts for quality of information exchange.

It seems to me that Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are designed so as to disallow real conversations about real and important things. I tend to avoid Facebook confrontation because I know what it’s like to wince at a status about the election with 102 comments bouncing between five people (all of whom think the other four are complete idiots). Tumblr oftentimes seems like a masturbatory indulgence for those who use it for social justice, where users follow exclusively people whose posts they already know they’ll like to see on their dashboards and anti-anon-hate pages and other things of the like pop up around every tag. Currently the Tumblr posts that get the most notes are all either pictures of cats, memes of the Queen, or the one valiant user who has managed to really stick it to an anonymous user’s unprompted “lol u suk go die!!!!1!!!111” in their ask box. I once watched hundreds of users flood the “epilepsy” tag with massive posts attempting to push down triggers with things like “STAND WITH THE EPILEPSY TAG! STOP THE TRIGGERS!” and “I can’t believe someone would do something like this.” Tumblr is a place where we fight these little battles, but once the battle is finished, and whether it’s won or lost, in the grand scheme of things it all seems sort of ephemeral. The battles themselves are manifestations of the dangerous side effects of social networking, where Tumblr is a large community of heroes defending their territory: the internet. That’s amazingly cool, but sometimes it feels like repairing rollercoasters in Rollercoaster Tycoon: fixing problems in a self-made society that’s always at least little bit removed from the real world.

Honestly, I think my most used tag on Twitter is #proudfishmom.

Of course, it’s possible to use these websites for productive conversations, and I applaud those who do, but I ‘m just not savvy enough to make them work like that for me.

So let’s get back to the original problem: that nagging reluctance to start a blog. If my prejudice is not so unfounded as I originally thought, then what am I really afraid of? Am I afraid that what I have to say isn’t important? Am I afraid that I’m going to offend someone? Am I afraid that I’m not actually smart enough to post intelligent criticisms and significant musings on life and living?

Apparently not anymore, or at least those things don’t seem to matter as much as they mattered this morning.

Welcome to my blog.