Blogging: diary meets dialogue

Just when I thought I convinced myself of the real reason for spending so much time behind the computer, fingers hovering over the keyboard, thoughts being processed a million miles a minute, it dawned on me that I was kidding myself.
I started blogging one year ago for the sheer love of writing. Okay, I am not a trend setter, let alone an example of alert trend following. You may call me one of the latest people to start writing their own blog.

I must admit, I tried it before a couple of years ago, but I had trouble producing a text within a limited time frame. For me this is one of the prerequisites of blogging, to spend as little time as possible on sharing a few lines dedicated to a small thought. If you are raising your eyebrows right now about my sloppiness or disdain, I would beg you not to this unless you feel the need to make some funny facial expressions just for the sake of making them.

I am all for the freedom of personal expression, as long as, and repeat after me, you don’t harm anyone else in doing this. One of the best credo’s ever, I think. There is a moral implication attached to this, of course there is. Thinking back of last Monday, the day I spent entirely online, dedicated to the dialogue with several people on, let’s swing a term, the art of blogging, I wonder how other people do this. All day. Every day. The thought of these people sitting on their chairs, reading their screens, typing words like crazy, surfing the web, posting pictures all the time, makes me, can I say this, sad. Am I judging this kind of thing? No. I love the web too, but I have never realized, until last Monday, how unhealthy it is. For me since I cannot speak for others. I don’t want to.

Okay, so here it comes, the preliminary definition of what blogging is, to me, I like to ad as quickly as I can, to prevent anyone to blame me for not being precise, just to name one: blogging is keeping a diary online and trying to find other people to read it. A good blogger knows or feels what other people care to hear, to create reactions, a back and forth, give and take: a continuous dialogue.

Needless to day I am talking about one specific type of blog here, the one that is written by a blogger who merely wants to share personal thoughts, give insight into his or her way of life and invite other people in. When I think of my own blog, and I do this thinking not only once, twice but even three times, I realize that it is difficult to know why, honestly why, I blog. Does it matter, one might ask. To be honest, yes, it does. I suffer from double expectations… reading blogs, personal blogs by nonprofessional writers, I expect them to give me a piece of their life to me. When I read a blog by a published writer who has produced several works that are considered to be literature, I expect and I am often granted with a positive result of this expectation, something that is different from the formal writing, something more loose, lighter, less composed. Something that exposes the writer maybe a little.

Trying to define the art of blogging, o my god, this is difficult. I feel the need to define ‘what is literature?’ first or something like that. Imprisoning myself in my self-designed (new) structure of writing a blog in a pre-set time frame (30 minutes tops) I have to end this blog now. To be continued…

Writing time (thirty minutes), word count (approx. 650), reading time (I guess five minutes).