I just finished reading Andrew Sullivan’s “Why I Blog” article from The Atlantic, and I thought that might be a good place for me to start.

I have had a blog presence since I was sixteen.  Back in 2003, when I joined Livejournal, new users still needed an access code from a current member.  I joined because it seemed fun, because my new college-age friends from a Stanford theater production were on it and I admired them, and because I was curious.  I’d never really heard of blogging, and hadn’t spent much time exploring the possibilities of the Internet Age.  In retrospect, this seems strange to me.

I’m from Silicon Valley.  My father is an engineer who loves to join startups.  In 1994, he and my uncle started one of the earliest Internet retail sites (http://www.inc.com/magazine/19960615/1966.html).  The first two employees (my dad and my uncle) had desks squeezed into our tiny basement.  The third sat at a folding table in the garage.  So the internet boom was my childhood.  This is why it surprises me to look back and realize how little technological exploration I did.  On the other hand, I got my first email address in fourth grade, which I’m starting to understand is unusual for people my age!

Sullivan’s article is fascinating, and I suspect it will benefit from multiple readings.  In the four pages, he discusses his own introduction to blogging and compares it to other forms of writing and publication, from personal diaries to famous essayists like Montaigne.  He describes the tone as “conversational” and says it’s more like a broadcast than a publication.  I’d never thought of comparing blogging to radio, but I can see his point.  The immediacy of the medium and the pressure to post regularly for fear of losing the audience does bring blogging closer to the “live” media of radio and television.

I always considered blogs as falling into two categories: the online journalist column and the public diary.  Two blogs I follow fit these.  The Marquee Blog, found via CNN.com, posts regular updates for my guilty pleasure – the world of screen entertainment.  On the other hand, I have followed dooce.com for years and have laughed and cried with blogger Heather Armstrong as she’s struggled with children, life, and emotional health problems.

Taking LIBR500 at the start of my SLAIS career brought a new way of thinking about blogging, as well as re-starting me on blogging.  From what I recall of the discussions, a blog is the ideal incarnation of Web 2.0.  It is designed to be immediate and interactive, from the inclusion of hyperlinks to the ability of readers to comment and get direct replies from the author.  Blogs are designed to start conversations.

Unfortunately, there are now so many blogs out there that the conversational part of blogging doesn’t really happen the way we might hope.  I held onto the WordPress blog I started for LIBR500, though I now write about whatever I want there. It’s a continual disappointment that most of my posts get no comments.  I used to journal, pouring my teenage soul into scrawled handwritten pages.  For the most part, I now prefer blogging.  I want the conversation. I want to know that people are reading.  Yes, WordPress has a statistics function to show how many people looked at which pages, but it’s not the same as a comment.

Last summer, I started working on a long-term project to organize and properly house my grandmother’s papers.  She seems to have written letters almost daily, and she saved carbon copies of what she sent – so we have the whole conversation.  It’s a remarkable personal archive, but unfortunately her filing style is along the lines of “hey look, there’s still room in that folder.”  (If you’re interested, I’ve written a bit more about this project here and here.)  I’ve found some of her journals in the boxes of papers, and in reading them, I was struck by the tone.  Sullivan describes blogs as “conversational” and designed for public consumption, while a diary is “almost always a private matter. Its raw honesty, its dedication to marking life as it happens and remembering life as it was, makes it a terrestrial log.”

My grandmother’s journals are raw and painfully emotional at times, while also chronicling the everyday matters of life.  But these diaries are infused with what I can only describe as a consciousness of future readers.  I think maybe she had a romanticized dream of herself as a great undiscovered diarist, whose works would be discovered posthumously and published to wild acclaim.  It’s something she’d have liked, I’m sure.  So yes, diaries are designed for private venting.  But I’m not sure Sullivan’s right to say that only a “few” diaries are intended for publication.  I think blogging was an inevitable development.  The cynical side of my brain says that’s because humans are inherently self-absorbed and like nothing better than to talk about themselves and their own opinions.  A less cynical take might be to say that humans are social animals.  We need private places to express our most personal thoughts, yes, but blogs allow us to discuss and learn with a wider population.  I have to wonder how many people throughout history wrote diaries with one eye to an imagined future audience.

The question is, does the idea or knowledge of a wider audience lead you to self-censor or to greater honesty?