I started blogging in September, 2003 after leaving a forum in which I kept a personal journal. Though personal, it was not private. A number of forum members read it and responded to it as I did to theirs.
I knew I had a small situation on my hands when, after I left the forum, I started a blog that night.
Writing was (is) cathartic and the response from my readers validated that I was writing something worth reading. A win/win situation, right?
I'm not so sure.
When one compares blogging behaviour with that of any other avocational activity, clearly the amount of time I spent and still spend on my blog(s) is more than "normal."
My favourite blogger is "quitting" her blog in less than two months. When she started the blog it was with the condition that it exist for exactly one year. In that time she's built up a large, faithful and adoring audience because she's an ace observer and interpreter of life and she deftly manages to get her astute observations written into her blog for all to enjoy. She is also PDF (pretty damn funny).
Right now, some readers of her blog are expressing "blog withdrawal anxiety," despite being given plenty of time to "adjust" to the upcoming termination.
I would venture to say that almost, if not all of her readers are blog writers themselves, so it's with an insider's perspective that they protest and attempt to sway her into "staying."
These people are passionate about blogging. They've come to feel that she is someone they "know."
And yet they don't know her--they know what she chooses to write of herself. Big difference.
One of the allures of blogging is that one can be whomever he or she pleases and the audience, unless they know you IRL (in real life--off line) will not necessarily know.
To expound upon the obvious, blogging is a relatively new phenomenon, thus the bar has yet to be set for what constitutes "normal" blogging behavior.
It seems that our blogging "compulsions" reach further out--to other bloggers--and in some way our blogging selves merge with the blogging selves of others.
To the uninitiated this may seem bizarre.
As for me, I now have four blogs. This one is the "primary" blog. I started a second in an attempt to examine deep, dark thoughts that I didn't want to share with the 150 (give or take) people that click over here each day.
Because photography is a rediscovered love, I started a photoblog at a site that is purely for that purpose. I had been (and still will be) inserting photos into my other blogs, but this one is different in that its is purely for photoblogging, for the amateur on up.
I started yet another blog recently, unique in form from the rest. It's an audio blog and I find it to be the most helpful in sorting through life issues. So far, only one person has listened to it. If no one but me listens to it, that's okay because I can go back and hear in my voice and the thoughts and feelings that I was having in that moment.
Me talking to me, as bizarre as that sounds has been a form of therapy that I could never have anticipated.
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The article below does a fairly decent job of examining some of the extremes, though most of us in the blogging community might not judge some of the bloggers in the piece quite so harshly. (The bloggers themselves have opinions ranging from complete agreement that blogging is a problem for them, to the opposite opinion).
For Some, the Blogging Never Stops
By KATIE HAFNER
Published: May 27, 2004
TO celebrate four years of marriage, Richard Wiggins and his wife, Judy Matthews, recently spent a week in Key West, Fla. Early on the morning of their anniversary, Ms. Matthews heard her husband get up and go into the bathroom. He stayed there for a long time.
"I didn't hear any water running, so I wondered what was going on," Ms. Matthews said. When she knocked on the door, she found him seated with his laptop balanced on his knees, typing into his Web log, a collection of observations about the technical world, over a wireless link.
Blogging is a pastime for many, even a livelihood for a few. For some, it becomes an obsession. Such bloggers often feel compelled to write several times daily and feel anxious if they don't keep up. As they spend more time hunkered over their computers, they neglect family, friends and jobs. They blog at home, at work and on the road. They blog openly or sometimes, like Mr. Wiggins, quietly so as not to call attention to their habit.
"It seems as if his laptop is glued to his legs 24/7," Ms. Matthews said of her husband.
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs...
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently...
... A few blogs have thousands of readers, but never have so many people written so much to be read by so few. By Jupiter Research's estimate, only 4 percent of online users read blogs.
Indeed, if a blog is likened to a conversation between a writer and readers, bloggers like Mr. Wiggins are having conversations largely with themselves.
...that does not seem to bother him.
"I'm just getting something off my chest," he said.
Nor is he deterred by the fact that he toils for hours at a time on his blog for no money...
Perhaps a chronically small audience is a blessing. For it seems that the more popular a blog becomes, the more some bloggers feel the need to post....
Where some frequent bloggers might label themselves merely ardent, (one blogger) is more realistic. "I wouldn't call it dedicated, I would call it a problem," he said. "If this were beer, I'd be an alcoholic."
This blogger, who lives in Hollywood and works as a scheduler in the entertainment industry, said blogging began to feel like an addiction when he noticed that he would rather be with his computer than with his girlfriend - for technical reasons...
Describing the rush he gets from what he called "the fix" provided by his blog he says, "The pleasure response is twofold," he said. "You can have instant gratification; you're going to hear about something really good or bad instantly. And if I feel like I've written something good, it's enjoyable to go back and read it."
And, he said, "like most addictions, those feelings go away quickly. So I have to do it again and again."
...for some people blogging has supplanted e-mail as a way to procrastinate at work.
People ... who devote much of their free time to the care and feeding of their own blogs and posting to other blogs, do so largely because it makes them feel productive even if it is not a paying job...
... "The Web's illusion of immortality is sometimes more attractive than actual cash..." .
Jocelyn Wang, a 27-year-old marketing manager in Los Angeles, started her blog, a chronicle of whatever happens to pop into her head (www.jozjozjoz.com), 18 months ago as an outlet for boredom.
Now she spends at least four hours a day posting to her blog and reading other blogs. Ms. Wang's online journal is now her life. And the people she has met through the blog are a large part of her core of friends.
"There is no real separation in my life," she said...
"Sometimes (though) you get really particular with the kind of link you want, so you search a little more, then a little more, then you want to see what other people are saying about that link you chose," he said. "And before you know it, some real time has passed."
Others find they are distracted to the point of neglectfulness. Tom Lewis, 35, a project manager for a software firm in western Massachusetts who has a photo blog (tomdog.buzznet.com/user), has occasionally shown up "considerably late" for events and has put off more than a few work-related calls to tend to his blog.
Mr. Jarvis characterizes the blogging way of life as a routine rather than an obsession. "It's a habit," he said. "What you're really doing is telling people about something that they might find interesting. When that becomes part of your life, when you start thinking in blog, it becomes part of you."
The constant search for bloggable moments is what led Gregor J. Rothfuss, a programmer in Zurich, to blog to the point of near-despair. Bored by his job, Mr. Rothfuss, 27, started a blog that focused on technical topics...
For months, Mr. Rothfuss said, he blogged at work, at home, late into the night, day in and day out until it all became a blur - all the while knowing, he added, "that no one was necessarily reading it, except for myself."
When traffic to the blog, greg.abstract.ch started to rise, he began devoting half a day every day and much of the weekend to it. Mr. Rothfuss said he has few memories of that period in his life aside from the compulsive blogging...
He still has the blog, but posts to it just twice a week, he said, "as opposed to twice an hour." He feels healthier now. "It's part of what I do now, it's not what I do," he said.
Suffering from a similar form of "blog fatigue," Bill Barol, a freelance writer in Santa Monica, Calif., simply stopped altogether after four years of nearly constant blogging.
"It was starting to feel like work, and it was never supposed to be a job," Mr. Barol said. "It was supposed to be an anti-job."
Even with some 200 visitors to his blog each day, he has not posted to his blog since returning from a month of travel.
Still, Mr. Barol said, he does not rule out a return to blogging someday.
"There is this seductive thing that happens, this kind of snowball-rolling-down-a-hill thing, where the sheer momentum of several years' posting becomes very keenly felt," he said. "And the absence of posting feels like - I don't know, laziness or something."
Tim Gnatek contributed reporting for this article.
Try the twelve step program.
Posted by: Peter Caputa | June 03, 2004 at 12:30 PM
Great post. I especially like all the nice things you said about *me*. ;) I read that article and wondered what these guy's problem is. Yes, blogging is inert, isolated, and yes, somehow keeping a record of life is at a remove from living a life - but it's not deserving of the level of scorn and opprobrium poured there. The people who hate blogs most, it seems, are journalists. It's pretty much an irrelevance to the population at large, and it's no more sad or addictive than playing with your phone, or writing postcards.
If you insert some other activity for the word blogging in that article - *any* other activity, you can see how pathetic and badly constructed it is. And what kind of a crappy world is it when their highest insult is that someone turned down some money in order to write something they wanted to write? FFS, we're supposed to be slaves to the coin? Who cares? Who cares if you're late to work one day because you're blogging, or because you're having a wank? Who cares if you file an article late or not at all, cos actually it was more fun to blog, or to have a wank? Who cares if you get up early on holiday to write a blog post (ie, do what you enjoy), or to have a wank?
Oh sorry, we were all supposed to check we have social credibility with the journos first, were we? Riiiiiiiiiiight.
Cos they're not wankers at all, now, are they?
Posted by: Vanessa | May 30, 2004 at 04:12 PM