Blogging myself for others

Is blogging the same as writing? I begin with this question addressed primarily to myself. As a lifelong writer and teacher of writing and of literature, I find I’m both attracted to and repelled by the blogging phenomenon. Generally, when writing something, among the first questions an author poses is “Who am I writing this for?” Who is the reader, the audience? The answer to this question varies, of course, but remains important even when the reader is only oneself, as in a diary or journal. While it’s true that when we write in journals only for our own eyes (present or future) we sometimes imagine some unknown reader who may puzzle over our private thoughts, that possibility usually remains rather remote. But is a weblog the same as a journal? In some ways I suppose it can be, yet there’s always the recognition that even the most obscure blog can have a larger and not necessarily always anonymous readership. Montaigne comes immediately to my mind. Perhaps that’s why he called his own scribblings essays. Although he insisted that he wrote only for himself (and a small circle of intimates), yet he wrote with the intention of publishing, of sharing his writing with a much larger world of potential readers. In “Of Giving the Lie,” he remarks: “Drawing myself for others, I have drawn myself with purer and better colors than were my first. I have no more made my book, than my book has made me.”

Certainly, blogging is similar to publishing, but without the usual complications. I’ve published, very little, but enough to know that it involves a certain amount of cooperation with others. As I said, there are potential readers to consider. What will appeal to them? What are their expectations, not only in subject matter but in language and style? And there are also editors and publishers. What do they want, besides good clean copy delivered on time? Sometimes there are even economic considerations: How much is this writing worth? Who will pay for it? What is the going rate? Does any of this matter in the creation of a weblog? I’m not sure I’m ready to answer my own questions, but I already suspect that some of these things do matter, even if in different ways than with print publication. While I can imagine only with difficulty the sort of reader who would want to read this particular entry to my blog, I am already wondering about such potential readers, and like Montaigne, I am feeling the tug of their imagined tastes and desires. It’s the compulsion to be amusing if not actually to write something of genuine value.

Although I’m interested in the motives of blogging, I’m also fascinated by the technology itself. When I decided that I wanted to experiment with a weblog of my own, I looked first at a few bloggers that I had bookmarked on my own website. I looked not just at their content, after all I’d seen that already, but at the technology behind the writing. Where were they hosted? What software were they using? How easy or difficult would it be to set up a blog of my own? How much would it cost? At first I considered building on my existing website, but then I soon realized that websites and blogs, while similar in some respects, are very different. Although I sometimes receive email from those who have visited my website, the interaction is rather limited. Sometimes they ask a question; sometimes they make a suggestion. Weblogs, on the other hand, assume a more dynamic relationship, offering not only a chronological record of postings, but also opportunities for interaction, for comments and even conversations and cross references with readers and other bloggers. There is something communal built into the form.

But that potential for interaction is one of the aspects of blogging that has deterred me from starting my own weblog sooner. I am not by nature a very sociable person. That is why I like websites and email. And I also prefer email to the telephone because it allows me the freedom to reply at leisure and with a more or less considered response, or not respond at all. I like the distance. It’s like a letter only quicker. Before the advent of email I was a fairly active letter writer and carried on a respectable amount of correspondence, both personal and professional. Unlike some, however, I do not regret the transition to electronic mail. I have always thought that email was the first great technological advance in communication since the telephone, even though it might seem to have taken us back to earlier forms like the letter or the telegraph. But I do recognize that correspondence by email tends to degrade our letter writing skills. And like many other forms of electronic communication, email is likely to be more ephemeral than old fashioned paper correspondence. Will scholars in the future collect and publish email? Will weblogs be collected, preserved and studied in the way that diaries and journals have been?