Why I Blog, And Why I Can't Not Blog
Sprague over at Diary of a Rat challenged me recently to write about why I blog.
A quick aside: am I the only person who doesn’t particularly like using the word blog as a verb (even though I just did above)? In other words, saying that I “write a blog about online media and online media cult-ery” sounds much more pleasing to me than “I blog about online media.”
In any event, after reading Sprague’s great piece about why he blogs/writes, it was fortunate timing that I also read a piece by Jason at Webomatica relating “reasons why I nearly quit blogging.”
This led me to think about why we choose to do things on an ongoing basis, whether it be going to work or cleaning up the dishes, and so on. The benefits of the activity (paying the rent, having a clean kitchen) must outweigh the results of not doing it (getting evicted, kitchen’s a toxic wasteland). Taking it one step further, in order to excel in anything in life, whether it be sailing or chess or breakdancing or blogging, you have to be passionate about it. And not only do you have to be passionate about it, but the really critical factor for success is that you have some level of compulsion that prevents you from not doing it.
It’s this compulsion, I’ll wager, that drives you to keep hammering away when all normal rationale tells you to do other human activities, such as eating, sleeping, or talking in normal fashion with other humans. It gives you that motivation, deep in the night, when you’re sleep deprived and you know you have to get up for work in four hours and thirty three minutes, that gives you that extra bizarre push to bang out a couple of meager words to send into the digital void.
Of course, others may argue vehemently against some or all of this, but this begins to set the stage for why I write, and these days that mostly means publishing this here Online Media Cultist blog. I’ve always felt that tension between writing and not writing, and for me the benefits of writing outweigh — most of the time! – the pluses of not (more TV and reading time, sleeping, eating Cheetos, etc.).
For a while I thought I was “supposed” to be a novelist, but really blogging suits me best. Probably the most important difference is that I can have an idea or whim or notion, whip some words together, hope to parse them into some coherent order, and shuffle it all online where – and this is the part that continues to amaze and mystify and delight me – anyone on the planet with an Internet connection has at least some infinitesimal chance of checking it out.
And joining the conversation. That’s best part number two. I get to kick things off, and then other people “out there” get to check in with what they’re thinking. This back-and-forth conversating often heads offline and in my case has led to some great connections and even friendships. Communities based upon shared passions and ideas is an incredible benefit of the Internet age, and the coolest part of all is that the whole shebang is just getting started.
So getting to be a part of such a community is a “selfish” benefit. And there are others as well. Sprague relates that “blogs can be great big business cards,” which is absolutely true. Online Media Cultist in many ways is a diary of what’s on my mind in terms of the industry I love and toil away in.
But cutting past all of the philosophical and intellectual rationale, writing and blogging is fun. So that’s the simple answer!
