And hence I bloggeth. I finally own a slice of the blogosphere. And from the extremely cleverly phrased title you can make out that I have never blogged before. So what's the protocol for my first post? Am I supposed to become effusively sentimental and thank my best friend's uncle's dog? Or do I list out the magnificent feats I am going to accomplish thorough this little piece of digital property that I now own? Will my blog be shunned by one and all because I started blogging on an inauspicious Saturday? Oh dear.....
Let me leave these concerns for later consideration and concentrate on the task at hand. And I start with a question which will seem ironic considering that I have started blogging. Why do people blog? The closest non-digital counterpart i can find for blogging is the diary. A diary is extremely personal property. Reading a diary which belongs to someone else is a serious breach of that person's privacy. A blog, on the other hand, places everything you write on the public domain. Or at least that is the idea. You can always create a blog and not give the link to anyone (as I know one of my dear friends does!). But that is the exception rather than the rule. A blog is thus the antithesis of the diary. If the diary were Beethoven the blog would be Lady Gaga! So I ask myself.. why does my generation want to share minute details of their lives with strangers? It is true that a blog is not merely a record of your daily activities. You also blog about your interests and passions but over a period of time you give out information that was erstwhile private or for friends only. And not only blogs, we have social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace etc and the quintessential example of "u wanna know what i'm up to?", Twitter. People seem to have a compulsive need to make details of their lives public.
It therefore begs the question... If blogging and social networking are so central to the lives of people of my generation, how did the people of earlier generations manage without these? The truth is, people of earlier generations had real interactions with other people. They did not "lol" or "rofl" (or :P for that matter) , they enjoyed real conversations with real people. My generation is starved of such interaction. And this creates a vacuum, a need to share their life on the internet. All people of my generation are affected by this in various degrees and seek the appraisal of their lives through digitized media. Heck , there are instances of people getting dumped on Myspace.
Social networking has surely made the world a smaller place but at the same time it has increased the distances between people.
And hence I bloggeth....
Let me leave these concerns for later consideration and concentrate on the task at hand. And I start with a question which will seem ironic considering that I have started blogging. Why do people blog? The closest non-digital counterpart i can find for blogging is the diary. A diary is extremely personal property. Reading a diary which belongs to someone else is a serious breach of that person's privacy. A blog, on the other hand, places everything you write on the public domain. Or at least that is the idea. You can always create a blog and not give the link to anyone (as I know one of my dear friends does!). But that is the exception rather than the rule. A blog is thus the antithesis of the diary. If the diary were Beethoven the blog would be Lady Gaga! So I ask myself.. why does my generation want to share minute details of their lives with strangers? It is true that a blog is not merely a record of your daily activities. You also blog about your interests and passions but over a period of time you give out information that was erstwhile private or for friends only. And not only blogs, we have social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace etc and the quintessential example of "u wanna know what i'm up to?", Twitter. People seem to have a compulsive need to make details of their lives public.
It therefore begs the question... If blogging and social networking are so central to the lives of people of my generation, how did the people of earlier generations manage without these? The truth is, people of earlier generations had real interactions with other people. They did not "lol" or "rofl" (or :P for that matter) , they enjoyed real conversations with real people. My generation is starved of such interaction. And this creates a vacuum, a need to share their life on the internet. All people of my generation are affected by this in various degrees and seek the appraisal of their lives through digitized media. Heck , there are instances of people getting dumped on Myspace.
Social networking has surely made the world a smaller place but at the same time it has increased the distances between people.
And hence I bloggeth....
No comments:
Post a Comment