Thoughts on Blogging

I was never able to keep a journal, though I tried sporadically as an adolescent and beyond. The few entries I made (each in a different notebook, most long since jettisoned) catalogued my angst and insecurities for my hypothetical future biographers. Why biographers would take an interest in my life at all was a question I seldom confronted head-on, though I had some vague idea that my greatness would eventually be recognized on some spectacular scale (nationally, internationally) and then people would look through my early writings for signs of said greatness. Looking back on this, I can only be grateful that I managed not to record all of my self-conscious twaddle. My hypothetical future biographers may or may not be able to track down my voluminous correspondence from my junior high school years, but even a small taste of that correspondence would be more than enough to convince them (if they need any convincing) that either my abilities were vastly overrated, or I was a very late bloomer.

Which brings me to letter-writing. I was much more successful at writing letters to friends than at keeping a diary. Perhaps it was the certainty of having an audience; unlike the hypothetical future biographers, my elementary school friends regularly wrote me back. Our letters got longer and longer over time. At the peak, we were writing 20-page letters to each other filled with reflections on the most trivial details of our lives. (Future biographers of my elementary school friends should take note; I've kept most of their letters. For what it's worth, the bulk of this correspondence was on paper; only one of those friends regularly kept in touch via email.) Yet at some point after my family moved back to the States, my motivation to write long letters to absent friends cooled and died. I think this was very closely aligned with my development of a local network of friends in my town, and thus a healthy social life.

So blogging is much more like letter writing than diary keeping, in terms of motivation - there exists a small audience of friends, plus the distinct possibility of strangers stumbling across it from time to time (despite the G-rated subject matter), and the thrill of occasional feedback in the form of comments.

But I have noticed some strange side effects of blogging. Although I do not shape my social life based on blogability, to some extent events and incidents that I do not take pictures of, or write about, seem not to exist. Many chance encounters (funny remarks made in passing on the subway or elsewhere) quickly fade from memory if I do not memorialize them here. And yet when I do memorialize events, the "spin" I have given them on the blog frequently infects any future retelling of the story. Even worse, events that I have written about frequently get tagged with the "I have already told this story" category in my mind and thus are dropped from conversation -- even with people who (as far as I know) do not know about or read the blog.