I'm a sometimes blogger. I write blogs to give voice to ideas my community should start talking about, to raise awareness of a spot of beauty in our lives or a social injustice that needs fixing. I start these conversations hoping that someone else will continue. I keep comments turned off because I'm trying to make you talk with other people.
Other bloggers want you to talk to them. A tactic to keep conversations going in a face-to-face situations is to offer a bit of personal information so that the other person will return the conversational ball with a bit of their own. Bloggers apply this tactic to the online world, and start the conversation by sharing something of their own life. They leave comments turned on, and are disappointed when no one responds.
Blogs are valuable historic documents. History books are often based on formal documents of the times. The cultural side is usually rounded out by glimpses of everyday lives found in letters and journals. I see blogs as one way to continue documenting informal social history, since letter writing has almost disappeared as a communication tool.
One of my great-great something or others kept a daily journal in the 1800s that is now used to set the cycle for a living farm in Pennsylvania. He was blogging using the medium that he had at hand.
Blogs are philosophy lessons. Every human being has something to teach me. So I find a spark of life in every blog I read. I can ignore that spark, feel superior to that spark, condemn that spark, but it is a spark nonetheless. I've chosen to look for the truth about life that the spark can teach me.
"Don't Look, Ethel" is a way to avoid all manner of information overload. I don't go to movies that would offend me. I don't own a TV, I seldom listen to the radio, and I don't read everything on the Internet. I'd have no life or voice of my own if I did.
But if I do look, I'm looking for the connection, the commonality that I have with all the bloggers who feel they have something to share, no matter how simple or mundane.
John Donne, Meditation XVII
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
*logorrhea = excessive volubility
