I’m not talking about BlogAds revenue or better chances to write Op-Eds. I mean our lives. Ben Casnocha writes:
…I recently had a great solo dinner in Rome. I had a
terrific companion (newspaper) and good food. About 1/4 of the way
through this thought crossed my mind: "This is an awesome meal. I’m
going to blog it." I did. I was committed in my mind to making it a positive night overall, and it did end up that way. In sum: when
I know I’m going to blog an experience, I’m committed to making it a
positive experience, and since intention and reaction mostly define the
quality of an experience, it usually turns out positive. True, I
could always commit to having positive days each day, but knowing I
will blog something introduces a weird form of "public accountability."
Ben is an excellent blogger; here are Ben’s impressions of France. Is he right about blogging?
Blogging’s pretty much an activity
like anything other. No doubt there are those
who feel empowered, and whose lives are therefore
improved, by the act of placing their thoughts
in the public domain – however, as a means
of universal human improvement blogging is no
different from skydiving or philately.
Because there’s a lot of dross out there.
Want to dissent on something that’s not explicitly stated but seems an undercurrent here and also in a lot of other places. The idea that blogging is so new that it is a topic unto itself. Sure, in some respects it is really new. But it’s not so new that people didn’t produce output in other times that were a lot like blogs. Michel de Montaigne. Wouldn’t he have made a great blogger? I think that because he was a fantastic essayist. And the informality of the essay is a lot like the informality of blog writing. And of course there are the particular forms of writing even closer to blogging, e.g. journalling, the keeping of diaries, travel writing. Blogs are one more medium of writing.
Where people say “blogging this, blogging that”, I like to replace it in my mind with “writing this, writing that”, because that way it doesn’t seem to parochial.
There’s a substantive difference between blogging and most people’s “writing”, though. Blogging is by definition done for a presumed audience. The overwhelming majority of people will never have their traditional written work read by more than one other person at a time, if that, and they know it. Most people don’t aspire to be published authors.
And writing for an audience of strangers, whether actual or merely assumed, does change both the external aspects of the writing and the internal mindset of the writer. So is it fundamentally different from what Michel de Montaigne did? No, not really. But it _is_ fundamentally different from what most people think of as “writing”, at least when interpreted from the perspective of the writer.
Does blogging improve my life? Hard to say. I know it’s _changed_ my life a great deal, but whether the net effect of those changes is positive or negative…well, too soon to say. Come back and ask me 5 minutes after I die, and I’ll have an answer I can be sure of.
I’ll say pretty conclusively that it hasn’t affected me in the particular way Ben described…but then, I tend to approach blog topics quite differently than he does, so that’s natural.
I’d definitely have to agree with Ben on this one. Years ago, I got in the habit of e-mailing out my travel journals to friends and family. This really helped me get in the habit of focusing on making sure my experiences were positive ones. It also gave me extra incentive to travel, helping me acheive my goal of visiting all 7 continents when I went to Antarctica last year. It’s always been fun sharing these experiences. Sharing photos along with this has added to the enjoyment. I’m just getting started sharing videos.
Writing also has other therapeutic effects as well that I think bloggers benefit from.
I share some more thoughts on this and links to some of my travel journals in this post on my blog.
I agree with Evan. I’m finding that noticing whether something is worth writing up takes me out of the moment and makes me meta when I should just be experiencing the fun. So in that way, blogging makes my life less.
But, I’ve also created a persona of being fun and active and a doer. Having that perspective of myself helps make it true. I’m going on a full moon river float next week, for example. I’m a little intimidated, but that is also the type of thing I want to tell my readers I do. So I try to live up to the way I present myself, which means doing more and having more fun.
Finally, the blog has given me so much. I get interesting emails from people; neat people show up and tell me about their lives. One guy even sent me a long drunken email about his ex-girlfriend. I never hoped for riches like that. From the Archives has definitely made my life better.
I think there is something like “anecdotal fun”: things that aren’t that fun when you are doing them but improve in the telling. Trips or concerts tend to be like this in that you tend to forget the boring hassles involved and remember the more exciting unusal things that do happen.
I’ve also made some great friends that I never would have met if it weren’t for blogging.
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