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Pen Pals for the digital age

Reading a few posts from across different blogs, I was thinking about what I personally get from blogging. I've written around this on different occasions and from different angles but wanted to try to really quantify it.

I feel compelled to write, to share, and there is an intense satisfaction in doing so. The sharing is a secondary but essential aspect; while journalling is a rewarding process it doesn't fill the same emotional gap as writing in public – at least for me.

The joy I get from building and tweaking the site goes hand-in-hand with the writing, I've mentioned the almost 'performance art' angle of this, but what really lights me up is the connections that blogging generates – even if fleeting, including:

• the comments and citations of others
• those who reach out via email and the ongoing conversations that fosters
• the connection to the wider blogosphere: either blogs I personally stumble across or those that are mentioned by others

I feel that when you have your own blog there is an innate curiosity, a pull to find others, and a desire to read the words of interesting people that goes beyond any other offline behaviour. Bix pulls a few threads together about introverts and extroverts, stressing the point that "introversion is not unsociability". I'm profoundly introvert but that doesn't mean I don't want to talk to people – it's how that happens, how I can control the context around meeting people. Walking into a room full of strangers and being expected to talk to them scares the life out of me, but sharing very personal experiences on the web and interacting with others on the back of it (generally on a one-to-one basis) is something I enjoy greatly. I will often initiate a connection when it's via the written word but come up with just about any excuse not to do so in person.

Bix also mentions of his time of "virtually non-stop tweeting" hoping he "must have been getting something out of it" else he fell victim to its (deliberately) addictive nature. While social media has certainly become more performative over the years, I saw it as another avenue of creating connection and feeding that curiosity. In February 2008 (no longer online) I wrote:

"Twitter is more the facilitator of communication rather than the end channel so it is probably better to take deeper discussion and analysis away from this environment in order to effectively extend a particular conversation."

Ultimately, social media became too burdensome to achieve that goal so I take the same approach with blogs: they are starting points that lead to connection and more focused conversation away from the public web.

The tagline for the blog at one point many years ago used to be "expanding my online world" which fits perfectly with this desire to connect with more interesting folks around the web.

Further to this, there is the feeling of being part of something bigger than yourself: the blogging "community". Even though blogging is a very singular pastime, the knowledge that there are others out there, just like you, who throw words at the web through some kind of compulsion to write and share – even if no one will read it – is profound. It reaffirms who you are and what you are doing.

Blogging is a lifeline, a connection to people and a world that might not be possible offline because of the reticence to interact and the fear doing so generates. I can't think of a better reason to do it.

Amit writes:

"What if I pressed reset on all that I have published till date? Get rid of all of it. Archive it, maybe. And start afresh. What if I do it every year? Or every month?"

The idea of an ephemeral blog has long intrigued me but, in my own musings, I opted for a "Thought for the day" page – now defunct. ¹

While it would be a fascinating prospect, the nature of my blog is the ongoing conversation with myself – past, present and future me all sitting down at a table and having a chat. (Although future me, for obvious reasons, can't give any spoilers.)

I enjoy looking back over what I have previously written, noting in particular where my thoughts and ideas have changed or stayed consistent. That wouldn't be possible with a truly ephemeral thing. Maybe the workaround would be to have old posts as only visible to oneself.

This ties is with this post from Tracy about publishing potentially compromising information on the web.

The question "what is compromising and especially from whose perspective" is a tricky one. It is so easy to cause unintended offence, especially when some are just looking for anything they can use as ammunition, but the point is wider than this.

It is very much my policy to be open and honest. Writing a post is usually what helps me get my thoughts in order but do I, should I worry about that candour being used against me? Could an employer use posts on mental health as an excuse not to interview (not that they'd ever let on or face accusations of discrimination) or tales of things that happened over 30 years ago?

How far would an ephemeral blog go to alleviate these concerns?

Sometimes things have to be said no matter the consequences but I generally steer clear of politics and religion; not because of not wanting to upset others or through fear of becoming the target of those who might not agree with me. I simply feel that there is enough potentially divisive stuff out there and choose not to pour more fuel on the fire.

In his post What is a blogchain? Horst Gutmann posits that:

" ... making a post part of a chain is an explicit action ... But what would happen, if we don't do that explicit step? This would also allow us to not only have a single parent-child path but one involving multiple parents, just as multiple thoughts can come together to form a new one."

He writes about creating a blog-graph rather than a blog-chain. It took me back to the idea of pathways and journeys through the blog.

Some kind of visual presentation of threads, especially in a social context, has been on my mind since the Google+ days – a means of depicting the spread of a conversation and the conversation itself in a graph-like manner. Horst's thinking translates this to the ongoing conversation with yourself AKA the blog.

It's someting I was already considering in some form so as to aid with those pathways and journeys, although not quite so elegantly.

The complexity a full map would require is currently beyond me but I can implement the first steps. I wondered, "what would it look like if my 'Start Here' page showed onward links from the posts it displays?" Now, the links are all available within the full post text but would if be useful to pull them out into a simple list for quick reference? So that's what I've been working on.

It's not amazingly pretty (I'm iterating the design) but it helps to add a bit of structure to things. Is this the best place to do it? It's as good as any. Does it do what I set out to achieve? At a (very) basic level, it provides the beginnings of a path (two levels deep now) – somewhere to start exploring things in a couple of different ways.