Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?
My wife chastised me a little bit today for blogging. Her argument was that it's an inherently egotistical endeavor, drains time from more important things, and is. . . well. . .just plain silly.
Rick, over at The Right-Wing Nuthouse is "unemployed by choice" and "financially comfortable," so he enjoys the freedom of taking the time to craft his relatively long essays and basically spend as much time as he wants online. The rest of us have to work blogging into our incredibly busy schedules. Juggling work, kids, blogging, (and for me, school,) can be stressful. Is it worth it, when it's all said and done? And yes, I'm using cliches throughout this post. That's part of the problem of blogging: you usually don't have enough time to think of a better phrase.
I'm not sure I could articulate my wife's objections to my interest in blogging and not make a mountain out of a molehill. But to rashly generalize: she's not totally opposed to the idea, she just doesn't see the point. I think one of her big beef's with blogging is the self-serving nature of getting other people to read and respond to your opinions.
Another qualm she has with blogging in general is that the topics are often "me, me, me" and "look what I did" and "I really enjoy this." She gets bored with some of the blogs see reads (when I make her) fairly quickly because there's very little she sees as relevant to society in general.
To over-simply her argument: "Blogging is primarily self-cenetered; who wants to read about what neat things your kids did every single day; and, don't you have anything better to do?"
While I don't agree with her take on blogging entirely, I think she raises some good points. Are we really too concentrated on ourselves and what we can get out of blogging? Is the blogosphere too self-centered, ego, and personality-centric?
Maybe we need to think about these things a little more. . .
Rick, over at The Right-Wing Nuthouse is "unemployed by choice" and "financially comfortable," so he enjoys the freedom of taking the time to craft his relatively long essays and basically spend as much time as he wants online. The rest of us have to work blogging into our incredibly busy schedules. Juggling work, kids, blogging, (and for me, school,) can be stressful. Is it worth it, when it's all said and done? And yes, I'm using cliches throughout this post. That's part of the problem of blogging: you usually don't have enough time to think of a better phrase.
I'm not sure I could articulate my wife's objections to my interest in blogging and not make a mountain out of a molehill. But to rashly generalize: she's not totally opposed to the idea, she just doesn't see the point. I think one of her big beef's with blogging is the self-serving nature of getting other people to read and respond to your opinions.
Another qualm she has with blogging in general is that the topics are often "me, me, me" and "look what I did" and "I really enjoy this." She gets bored with some of the blogs see reads (when I make her) fairly quickly because there's very little she sees as relevant to society in general.
To over-simply her argument: "Blogging is primarily self-cenetered; who wants to read about what neat things your kids did every single day; and, don't you have anything better to do?"
While I don't agree with her take on blogging entirely, I think she raises some good points. Are we really too concentrated on ourselves and what we can get out of blogging? Is the blogosphere too self-centered, ego, and personality-centric?
Maybe we need to think about these things a little more. . .
posted by J. Brisbin @ 8/26/2005 04:14:00 PM
1 Comments:
I've noticed in the blogosphere, as in the real world, there tend to be both introverted and extraverted types. Perhaps more precisely, people oriented toward the external world, and those oriented toward the internal world.
I've heard a great deal of complaints by externally oriented people about internally oriented blogs. Evidently they find such blogs boring or irritating or "no-account", as many people in this area might say. Personally, I find most externally oriented blogs to be quite the same, if not more so, since I tend to see the causes and solutions of the world's problems as seated not in the political, social or cultural areas that are so popular in most "current issue" blogs, but as seated in the human heart--a very interior place indeed.
Personally, I tend to enjoy the more internally oriented blogs, those by people who aren't afraid to closely consider their own innards and send honest reports of what they find there out to the rest of us, who--if we are intrepid enough--can then apply what they've learned to ourselves and the people in the world around us where it is applicable to do so. Perhaps it is my own preference for the internal mode that causes me to think so, but I firmly believe that learning what makes any single individual tick--including ourselves--has the potential to help us understand a great many other people. The world, even. Not so selfish after all.
Internal. External. Different approaches. Different strengths. Different audiences. Both needful.
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