Blogging: Leaving your mark on the universe
SHAWNA SWEENEY VOLUNTEER STAFF
A few years ago, a friend of mine asked me what happened to Wil Wheaton of Star Trek fame after he gave up his role as the lovable (and sometimes laughable) Wesley Crusher. We giggled and giggled and bonded immediately over our embarrassing adolescent crushes on the young ensign. I told her that I had no idea where his career went after outer space, but I would definitely ask the Internet about it as soon as possible.
The ensuing web search led me straight to wilwheaton.net, a “web log” written by Wil Wheaton himself. “What in the world is a web log?” I asked myself. “And why is Wesley Crusher writing one?”
So in the spirit of pure research worthy of any Enterprise crew, I revisited the oracle of the Internet and asked
These days pretty much everybody under the age of 30 (and a significant percentage of those over) knows about blogging. This time when I Googled “blog,” my search returned over 2.5 billion hits. That is a lot compared to 2001 when I was lucky to even locate one blog, let alone billions.
In the past five years the blog has transformed itself into many shapes and formats to service the wildly diverse interests of the world population. You can check out everything from press blogs to political blogs to puppy dog blogs. Blogs about knitting and nanotechnology and random acts of kindness.
The advertising industry is going crazy over blogging because they can’t seem to define a marketing model that holds up against the entire blogosphere. There is no “average” blog consumer, just like there is no “average” human being.
But if you bore beneath the punditry of the political blogs, if you look closely under the glossy press releases from the corporate blogs, if you look beyond the last major plot twist of your favorite television blog, you find a different and more intimate kind of blog: the personal kind.
Down in the salt mines of personal blogging you can unearth actual lives being lived. You can read what it’s like to be a middleaged postman or a 20-something waitress or a teenage runaway. An elderly biologist or amateur historian or hysterical whackjob. You can read about different hobbies, different countries, and different perspectives. You can find life — pure and unmediated. And, there is something deliciously vicarious about this kind of voyeurism — an ability to observe, anonymously but firsthand, what is really happening to someone.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of personal blogs are crap. They are flooded with mindless memes and blurry camera-phone pictures and drama of the worst kind. But there are also a hefty handful that take the business of reporting their lives very seriously. They want to show what the world looks like from their perspective and what it might mean to live like that.
Some folks say this is the worst kind of narcissism — believing that someone else would care what is happening to a stranger. Or worse, that the author might be making some of it up and blurring facts to fit a fantasy.
I am sure that fantasy guests star in blogs occasionally, but much less often than honesty. Mostly I think that people maintain personal blogs because they miss the sound of their own lives. It is hard to have a conversation and really be heard anymore. You have to compete with media clutter and misinformation and short attention spans. You have to go head to head with the whole wide world. A personal blog gives you your own little piece of the virtual pie, a customizable view into whatever you want to share and a receptive audience who can absorb and respond at will.
On the USS Enterprise, every last person down to young Wesley Crusher had a vital role on the ship. The Star Trek society seemed much simpler and most of the problems the crew encountered erupted up on distant planets that weren’t visible for more than one episode. Real life isn’t exactly like that and sometimes we get to feeling very small. But at least for a fleeting moment — a short commercial break — life can be organized inside a tiny text box and make sense for a while. It can be shared and digested. It can be special again. And in a universe like that, anyone can find a comfortable place to belong.
