May 07, 2006 15:58
I was thinking a little bit ago about the role of blogging for the individuals involved both in its production and consumption. Do we write entries in these journals out of a great desire to express something of ourselves, to transmit information we feel other people need, to promote ourselves as points of interest or possible friends? Do we write entries specifically in the hope that other people will post responses, and if so, do we prefer responses in the nature of direct feedback on the subjects which we have posted, or in more generic terms of multi-directional communication? Is it enough for me, for example, to write this entry for the purpose of writing it, either to entertain or inform you, or to endear myself to you for having written something interesting? Or do I want people to respond to it, and if so do I want them to give me their opinions on what I've written, or simply write anything at all so I feel like I have communicated with them? Do I have specific readers in mind (the people on my Friends list) or am I writing in awareness that there may be other people who read my entries, either casually or intently, whose consumption does not ever come back to me directly?
I look at the various types of entries I see in other peoples' blogs, and especially the proliferation of memes, and I find it very interesting. I feel like the meme is increasingly the normative unit of blogging, passed from one friend to the next as a social activity. But it is also a way of generating a large number of topics of conversation. Suppose, for example, that I filled out a meme asking about everything from my favorite books and movies to what features I find attractive in others, to what objects are in my field of vision. What purpose does such an entry serve? What sort of comments are people likely to leave in response to it? If I fill out a meme and people write back with comments specific to my answers ("Hey, I also like that movie," or, "You like people with glasses? Then you'd like me!"), was my goal to get them to talk about the subjects at hand, or just to talk in general? And what was their goal in responding to those entries? Do we really want to talk just say our respective pieces about how a certain movie was good and then move on, or are we hoping to attract further discussion once a reasonable segue from the meme-response to other topics comes up?
I do not mean to place any moral valuation on meme-ing as an activity, but I am curious about it because I find myself commonly attracted to the prospect of filling memes out, and I see that a lot of other people do as well. It could be that they are a formula through which we can have things to say even when we do not have some specific entry idea in mind, or it could also be a mark of solidarity, as with the "Friday Five" I recently saw here and there. If we all fill out responses to the same meme we can compare notes, but then what? It is a bit like surveys, but I notice that survey entries seem to be on the decline. We are less interested, it seems, in formulas that evaluate us on our responses, and more interested in creating lists.
But I also wonder about personal journal entries, which can range from details smaller than most would put into written journals (as per my last post about coffee and the bad movies I saw that day) to broader comments on politics, society, or at least our circles of friends and acquaintances. All of these are worthwhile purposes for writing (and I read nearly every entry that each of my LJ friends writes with interest), but I am really curious about what motivates us to write these things in such a strange medium: at once both massively public--beyond even the limits of our circle of friends--and decidedly small and passive when viewed in the larger mass of online blogs. Why, I must be asking, am I writing this?
Addendum: I realized in re-reading this post that it sounds sort of whiny; I was not at all intending to single out anyone's blog for scrutiny, but rather to write about my own wonderings about the social practice of "blogging." And to create conversation. ;)