A final note
Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 | Uncategorized
So there it is - 10 posts on Obama and blogging, done.
I’m not going to dramatize this experience. It’s been fairly mundane, let’s be honest. I’m clearly not a huge fan of blogging. I haven’t made any real effort to write truly insightful posts on this topic, though it’s within my ability. I could have tried harder, I could have written better and more, etc, etc.
Interestingly, I think I would have poured more of myself into this effort if I knew someone was watching and reading. Someone who wasn’t paid to do so. Someone who was legitimately interested in what I had to say.
This is something I realized last night while in the shower. It got me thinking: “is that why they do it?” Countless bloggers out there and only a small fraction have a good-sized audience. I’m not talking about your Andrew Sullivan’s and your Perez Hilton’s - those guys have made a business out of their blogs and whether they love the work or not, they’ve got a pretty clear incentive to do what they do.
I’m talking about the unsung heroes, unpaid workers, the people who slave away at a blog that is nowhere near as widely read as Sullivan’s or Hilton’s. Why do it?
I could never suggest that I have all the answers. I wouldn’t presume to know why Ryan Flanagan or Kyle Brown write their blogs, not entirely at least. But if I were in their positions, owning and operating a blog that has a small but relatively considerable audience, my reason for continuing to write would be simple: people are listening.
It’s hard to justify continuing to write a blog that no one reads. It’s difficult to press onward when the only feedback I get is from spam bots. This feels too much like a masturbatory experience, a self-loving effort to churn out these posts for an audience of none. And this isn’t self-loathing, not in any regard. I’m just recognizing who I am - a nameless, faceless blogger in a crowd of millions, not worthless enough to reject but nowhere near notable enough to remember. It’s not self-hatred, it’s self-awareness.
And therein lies the problem, that the only one aware of me… is myself.