Future Blogging

Blogging is still fairly new, and it will continue to evolve. Anything we say about it today has to be tentative. That aside, I think it’s quite interesting how many people start blogs. I would not have guessed that so many people felt that they wanted to say something to the world. Blogging makes it easy to talk to everybody, but that impulse must have existed before; how did it express itself?

For me the impulse expresses itself as a tendency to compose mini-essays in my head on whatever subject caught my attention. I often do it while walking. In the past I rarely told these to anybody and I rarely wrote them down. So what this blog is doing, at least in its current incarnation, is making it easy to write them down. In fact, my current goal of writing an entry every weekday is more or less forcing me to write them down. Does the popularity of blogging mean that everybody does this? My guess is no, that there are many different reasons for blogging.

Obviously some people blog to attract attention. In blogging today that more or less forces you to be increasingly outrageous, to shout louder. However, my impression is that that is a minority. Most people seem to write blogs because they have something they want to say. While I’m sure everybody would prefer to have readers than not, I think that for most people readers are not the point. The point is to speak.

Blogs aren’t going to change the world, at least not in the way some people think they will, by replacing journalism. The blog echo chamber and the speed at which information, true or false, travels is a consequence of the Internet, not of blogs. The same thing would happen if there were no blogs, it would just happen over e-mail instead.

Where blogs could change the world is by giving so many more people a chance to speak, and so many more people a chance to listen to what other people are saying. When lots of people have blogs, lots of people have a chance to find out what people are like. Perhaps this will help increase understanding of other people, help people see that we are all more or less the same. Or, you know, not. It could easily go the other way, and people could focus on blogs that will reinforce their preconceptions, and ignore the rest. In fact, of course, both will happen simultaneously, and we’ll be left in the same muddled mess that we are in now.

In the days before television, people had to entertain themselves much more than they do today. Perhaps blogs are a way of bringing us back to those days, when people could still be amateurs.

In any case, I think the simple fact that so many people want to speak is very interesting. I would not have guessed that. I have to believe that this is a good thing. It is better to be an author, a creator, than a consumer. The act of saying something forces you to consider just what it is you want to say. Even if you are just repeating the work of others, you are thinking about what you want to repeat. Thinking is good. We need more of it.