Hubris

Aha, now we've come to it! The cliche 'why-do-I-blog?' blog post.

With all apologies to those of you still languishing in Psych 101, please allow me to wax a tad existential (I never made it to college, thus was denied any appropriate forum in which to get this crap out of my system before the midlife crisis hit, k?).

Why DO any of us blog? What gives us the sheer hubris to decide that Our Opinion Matters... at least enough to immortalise it on one of these slickly encapsulated little Mc.html templates? And on reflection, why would any sane... or more realistically, even any suicidally bored person trapped in the Ninth Circle of Cubicle Hell voluntarily sift through the rummage sale of my (or anyone else's) ineffectually articulated mental processes? The blurry, shaken, noisy photos? The tortured poetry? The tangled prose? The adolescent rants? The cute kitten drawings?

Daily, more and more courageous, talented, misguided, brilliant, cranky, opinionated, literate, articulate, passionate, bored or just plain borING individuals set out to pitch these little tents here in the vast outback of the Interweb. With a tip of the hat to the Prince of Hubris himself, a blog can be a simple Message in a Bottle... for some of us it may represent the territorial urge; a metaphorical pissing-on-the-gates of modern society... or even a brilliantly ascerbic primal scream of self-actualisation from an anonymous corporate drone.

Blogs can be as simple as a tech-savvy communications device for far-flung relations, such as a baby journal

There are blogs about the daily pain of being an adolescent French girl (for the love of Pete!!).

Blogs about art.

Technology blogs.

A blog that makes an ingenious stab at answering every and any question one could possibly dream up.

Some blogs start out as simple rants on daily life, and via the transformative paradigm of the Net mentality (and not just a little talent on the parts of their authours, mind you!) become Celebrity Blogs. No, no, not blogs about celebrities... well not at first, anyway. In this instance, Everyman has become bona fide celebrity in his own right, via the magic of a daily public web journal of his toils, misadventures and peevish observations.

Personally, I find blogging (and reading select blogs) a captivating sociological peek under the rug of modern culture. Reality TV for the intellectual... no wait, that's me being a condescending pain in the ass. It's crack cocaine for the net addicted. Why else would I be up until 2 AM on a Sunday, reading about a 23 year old Bay Area chick who knits and has a somewhat disturbing fascination with cupcakes.

Blogging evokes the same tantalising sip of voyeurism as provided by the insanely popular What's In Your Bag? photoblog thread on Flickr.com -- the premise is quite simple: Dump out your pocketbook, backpack, messenger bag, laptop case, man-purse, whatever... onto an appropriately large, well-lit horizontal surface, snap a bad photo of it, upload it to Flickr, then add cute little interactive rollover tags documenting your scattered treasures. I Triple Dog Dare you not to click that link, then doubly not spend half an afternoon peering at total strangers' lives as expressed by the contents of their carry-on.

Much to the chagrin of many of the highly talented and creative photographers on the Flickr site, it seems regardless of how technically sound, colourful, lovely, artistic or just Bloody Damned Good all their other photos on their galleries are, the 'whatsinyourbag' tagged snap instantly vaults to the top of their click-list. The chimps in that particular zoo (yep, including yers truly!) are somehow inexorably drawn to gaze at an endless stream of iPods, lipgloss, Moleskines and used tissues, variously spread out on appalling dorm carpeting, banal conference tables, or hideous hotel bedspreads.

I have a theory. It's probably wrong, as most of my half-arsed demi-intellectual caffeine-and-insomnia-fueled pop psychology theories are... but here goes:

We are all Voyeurs and Attention Whores. Both. Simultaneously.

Is that a bad thing? Not actually. Not so long as we remain honest with ourselves and clear about our goals. Here's the thing. Blogging, photoblogging, setting up a brilliant web art gallery, rambling on about how much your roomate sucks, or simply dumping the contents of your bag out for the world to view, exercises a spirit of creative play that the majority of us leave behind with adolescence, in order to focus on grown-up issues such as bills, kitty litter, tax law, how to mix the perfect Cosmo, and whether or not that back molar's gonna need a root canal this month.

I consider blogging (for me, personally) to be a little healthy mental yoga. Remember the joy we got from fingerpainting in kindergarten? Setting up a blogsite and raving (or ranting) about Things That Matter to you is (at least in my opinion) becoming a very popular outlet in which disenfranchised creatives of all stripes may express themselves.

Blogging, in short, encompasses everything from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Most of it poised with statistical inevitability, amidst that vast clump of the bellcurve reserved for the staggeringly mediocre.

Cheers,

LFR