david taus

Let's Step Back For A Minute

music: Sound Tribe Sector 9- 10/31/00

I just finished reading an extraordinary article about blogging and feel the need now to justify (or at least more thoroughly explain) myself. Indeed, blogging has become a phenomenon among the younger members of our society, a phenomenon worthy of some real attention for various reasons. So I will indulge for a bit and meditate on this blog thing, here at post #100. It’s only fitting.

The article focuses on the high school aged bloggers of the world, explaining the weblog or online journal as a cross-breed of the instant messenger and reality-television type vouyerism. To a lot of teenagers, it seems, blogging is a social phenomenon. Teens know that their friends and classmates are reading. teens use their blogs to fill various social functions, from announcing parties to bitching about this and that to an extension of therapy. Blogs range from one line rants to full-on, uncensored descriptions of the most deep-down private thoughts a young person might have. All in all, an intruiging psychological and sociological study, to be sure. The internet, as tmo would say, is a strange place.

And here I find myself composing an entry that will be posted on a blog of my own. The plot thickens.

My knee-jerk reaction is that I’m nothing like these kids described in the article. I’m not announcing any parties, I’m not bitching about this and that, I’m not disclosing my inner life to the extent that I wouldn’t want my parents to read this (in fact, I encouraged mom to read). What am I doing, then? I think that I’m processing, thinking out loud to nobody and everybody about whatever happens to be weighing on my mind on a given day. Admittedly, it’s been a positive exercise. Writing about what I’ve been thinking about has helped me mentally navigate and frame my world in a very healthy way, and has brought a level of reflection back to my life that was absent for some years.

Why not write in a book and keep it in a sock drawer, then? I used to do that. Why did I stop? Why, now, am I writing things that I know people will read, that deep down I want people to read? This, after all, is the essence of the blog-we write because we know there is an audience. If there were no audience, or we didn’t care about writing for them, we would still be writing in books and keeping them in our sock drawers. The answer, for me, has to do with giving people access to my thoughts. I’ve sometimes been accused of being a bit inaccessible, of being hard to read, and I think that I started this thing in the hopes that people could more easily gain access to my thinking if they wanted to.

And at the same time, I think I’ve been so diligent about writing because there has been nobody here late at night to talk to. I’ve been doing this during my time in grad school, a decidedly lonely period. I’ve noticed that when I’ve had good and positive interactions with people in my world, I’m less inclined to write here. Writing in a private way but so others can read it gives me the feeling that there is still a social context late at night when I can’t do any more schoolwork and everyone else is asleep. Much in the same way, I think, that television makes people feel less lonely. Maybe this is my television, since I haven’t really watched the box in over 7 years. Maybe the blog is following in the footsteps of reality television, contributing to our society’s peeping tom fetish, and I am just a part of that trend. Maybe.

Still, I would like to believe that there is something qualitatively different between me and the teenaged bloggers referred to in that article. For one, I am 25 and in graduate school. I also write in complete sentences. I strive for some substantive content, for expanding my personal experience to more general themes that any passerby might be interested in reading about. Beyond that, though, I’m not sure that much is different between the twentysomething intellectuals of anize.org and the teenaged bloggers of livejournal, except that in my peer group, I am the exception. When some of my friends find out that I keep a weblog, they laugh a little. It is something that my generation missed by a couple years, much in the same way that we missed instant messaging.

Sometimes I think that it is rather odd that I’m so prolific online. I would like to believe that we anize’ers really do have something to say, that we can contribute original and substantive content to the onslaught of information, that we can counterbalance the terabytes of absolute shit that is out there, but it may not be so. We may be guilty of the same things these teenagers are guilty of, except at a more highbrow intellectual level. The contemplation of one’s navel can take many forms.

Will I stop blogging? Probably not. Will I consider my purposes in writing more in the future? Yes. Am I ashamed of all this? Not really. Has this been an important reality check? Absolutely. Sometimes I forget that what I type here, by myself, usually deep into the night, is transmitted to the world, and therefore becomes part of a larger social context. Nothing exists in isolation. I am not excluded from the implications of that article. The trick is to figure out exactly where this piece fits, and then what to do with it. After 100 posts, it seems that I’m not there yet. Ever onwards. To struggle is to progress.

Posted by davidtaus at January 12, 2004 11:52 PM