Functions of bloggery
Perhaps because I have been neglecting my own while enjoying other people’s, blogs are on my mind lately.
One of the main psychological functions a blog performs, I think, is to create an impression of a cohesive sort of life – one in which all the different parts, radically disparate as they seem and feel, are contained and owned and thought of as part of a well-integrated self.
As I create this post can I see, to the right of my screen, a neat little list of the tags I was instructed to set up when I began blogging so that my posts could be labelled: ’writing’, ‘teaching’, ‘sociology’, ‘making things’. It’s a list that conveys an impression of balance, coordination and harmony and perhaps an appealing sort of diversity that might arise in any given week of my life. And it cleverly masks the complex reality of trying to fit both my computer and my sewing machine on one small and slightly wobbly desk, of having two other larger desks in two university campuses and the books I need being perennially at the wrong one, and of trying to keep Friday afternoon free for my children’s writing and finding it filling up, week after week, with teaching obligations. (In a moment of optimism while first setting up this blog I even made a tag for ‘gardening’ posts. Gardening! I have to plan three days ahead to go to the corner shop for milk!)
Having a life with lots of different components may be a psychological liability, but in the world of blogging it’s definitely an asset. The life of a mother of seven who homeschools, runs her own business and is a born-again Christian makes for much better bloggery than a single gardener who runs a gardening business, reads about gardens and on the weekends, potters about in his garden (though I envy that guy and I bet he always has milk in his fridge). Best of all I like the blogs of happening-career-and-family persons who, between descriptions of their massive public speaking engagements and their child’s uncommon excellence in cello playing, post a picture of the little hazelnut and orange torte that they have just whipped up for some old friends who stopped by unexpectedly.
There are plenty of jokes about these sorts of blogs and the humour tends to be of the who-do-they-think-they-are-kidding-and-if-they-really-are-doing-all-that-stuff-how-do-they-have-time-to blog-about-it? variety. But on the whole I think it’s a mistake to understand bloggery primarily as an exercise in impressing other people with the breadth of one’s own personal skills and interests.
Generally I think the function of a blog is less about persuading its audience and more about persuading its author that all the different parts of life really do fit together in some cohesive way.
