Webupon

In 2006, like millions of others, I jumped onto the blogging bandwagon. Not surprisingly, it quickly turned into daily narcissist rants about my life that no one else cared about unless you are a celebrity. Perhaps I simply enjoyed seeing my mundane content published on the same platform as all those famous people. My blog was like a stage, and many including me, felt elevated by it. There’s a vast audience out there, I thought. Potential vast audience.

Of course, that audience never came. My comment count remained mostly zero for 3 years straight (which is completely justifiable, mind you). This is when I realized that despite the Internet’s infinite denizens, it is a lonely place indeed. I began to explore beyond the veil that concealed me from the real reasons behind keeping this online log. Maybe it gave me a sense of unique self identity. But in reality, I’ve lost all of it.

The anonymity granted by the Web is both a gift and an obstacle for many. The good side is, I finally managed to separate myself from my physical traits. As others read my posts, they no longer have in mind my face, my age, or even my gender. That’s very liberating in a way. However, the disassociation of such characteristics stripped my bland words of its voice, dynamics, and, human importance. Every one of us desires to be unique, and we all are. But in the personal blogosphere, if your ideas aren’t doing that for you, nothing else will. We want to be noticed, and have our thoughts and experiences appreciated. However in the end, the vanity of that truly amounts to nothing. People commented on each other’s posts just to have them comment back. It undermined our thoughts.

In the end, everyone became a bobbing head floating on the ocean of bobbing heads.

Like the old fashioned personal diary, personal blogging is a form of self communication and reflection. Other than greatly improving my “self-narrative techniques”, it taught me how to write for myself. Feedback is a great way to communicate, but I’ve learned to do without them. I began to write for self expression and to organize my thoughts, not because I want others to read it and pseudo-appreciate it. Sometimes, talking to yourself isn’t all that bad. It can even lead you to new and exciting grounds.