Why Do We Blog?

Why me? What sparked me up?

Eh, a combination of things. For starters, I’m a talker – if you’ve ever met me live and in person, this is painfully obvs. It's not unusual for me to stop myself mid-rant/mid-soliloquy saying "OK, I'll stop talking now." And I do. I'm also a listener – HONEST! I’m radically curious. I want – no, NEED – to know everyone else’s stories, motivations, how do you cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What are you thinking about this morning? I rilly wanna know!

Between the move to ‘burblandia, aging, life's basic slings and arrows and whoopsie, my audio crapping out, I’ve become significantly less social. My style’s been cramped, verdammt noch mal! !

This crampage resulted in a big-ass backlog of shit I wanted to say and conversations I wanted to have. So, here I am, seven+ years later, textually talking and listening. Works for me.

Why do  other people blog? I asked a few of my compatriots in the blogging brigades.

Michelle Combs of Rubber Shoes in Hell has been writing since 2013.

I started blogging because I have wanted to write for as long as I can remember. I also have a very limited attention span, so a blog is perfect for me. Nearly instant gratification and then my mind can wander along to the next thing. What I found after getting into blogging, is the interactions with my readers are highly satisfying and extremely valuable to me.

Michelle has a recommendation at the top of her comments section:

Add your comments below. Profanity is encouraged, but not required. ;)

I read that and KNEW, beyond all doubt, that Michelle was my total blog-sister!

Steve M. of No More Mister Nice Blog has been in the political comment field for 17 years now. I count on him for his incisive, informed and un-sugar-coated opinions

I began blogging in 2002, after a book project I was working on didn't pan out. I've held down ordinary day jobs all my adult life, but I've always had projects I worked at on the side – standup comedy, publishing a line of humorous postcards. They tended not to work out. Blogging had no barriers to entry, and people in the early 2000s were open to the idea that someone they'd never heard of was offering opinions on a subject that mattered to them. I caught the attention of more readers than I expected, and now I can't stop. People take what I write seriously. It's hard to give that up.

And I’m very happy that he can’t stop.

Infidel of Infidel753 (We are not fallen angels, we are risen apes) writes about a wide variety of things and on Sundays he posts a round-up of very cool, interesting shit he’s been reading and looking at all week.

I've been blogging for almost 13 years, almost as long as it's been a common practice.  I don't remember exactly "why" I started, but really, I wouldn't have been able not to.

Writing is the thing I'm best at, and I've always had an almost physical need to do it.  But in pre-internet days, the available formats had substantial defects.  In the eighties, I regularly tried writing for magazines, but in that situation there's always a gatekeeper – the editor – standing between you and the potential readers, and while I had a couple of successes, I collected the usual stack of rejections.  In my favorite case, around 1985, I sent a proposal to a conservative magazine for an article explaining why the Soviet Union was likely to break up within a few years.  The editor rejected it as simply too unbelievable.

When zines became a thing in the nineties, of course I got heavily into that as well.  The gatekeeper problem was eliminated, but zine writing in almost all cases was very limited in scale.  I never got more than a few dozen subscribers.  Printing and mailing were labor-intensive and cost a non-trivial amount of money.  Advertising in "real" media would have been far too expensive, so zines advertised mostly by exchanging ads with other zines of similarly limited circulation.  Nevertheless, I kept doing it for years.

But the blogosphere is the ideal medium.  As long as you keep it simple, it doesn't cost anything (well, there's an internet connection, but everyone pretty much needs that these days anyway).  There's no editor standing between you and the audience.  While readership is still fairly small, it's much bigger than would have been practical with zines.  And a blog is accessible anyone with an internet connection -- billions of people.

Blogging enables me to "think out loud" and get my ideas and interests out there in front of other people who may also find them appealing.  It enables me to connect with others who share the same interests.  I read blogs from all over the world, and likewise have readers in many countries.  There is, of course, the "asshole problem" – people who seem to thrive on conflict and argument and who seldom comment except to attack -- but when you get right down to it, the worst they can do is cause aggravation.

Blogging enables people to express their individuality.  Among the great number of blogs I read, the most striking thing is the sheer differentness among them, in almost every imaginable way.  Many or most of those bloggers may have dull office jobs and/or present a conformist appearance in meatspace – hell, so do I – but in the blogosphere they can be who they really are.

Truth!