The luxury of pupose-less blogging can be a good thing
Edit: Be sure to read Krishna Kumar’s take on blogging, work and creativity.
Oh my, I didn’t manage to write a single post in the whole of April.
While blogging fatigue seems to be a widespread phenomenon, it’s a particularly soft spot when your research is largely about blogging and you are in the process of organizing a panel at an international conference concerned chiefly with personal Web publishing technologies and how they are changing how we talk about science - among other things.
But, as always, time is the essence. I’m starting to wonder what on Earth I was doing a year ago that allowed me to blog so much (or rather: what I was not doing). Perhaps that’s the wrong way of looking at it though. Yes, blogging takes a lot of time, but it very much depends on how you approach it. Maybe I’ve been a little too concerned with saying it all, i.e. with restricting myself to the planned, substantial and structured writing that we are accustomed to in other contexts . Blogging isn’t always like that and I believe that that’s a good thing. The minimal audience for a blog, as I love to repeat incessantly, is its author. In other words, a blog can be useful as a tool to systematically structure your thoughts - nothing more, nothing less. Forgetting about readership and self-reflexivity (i.e. thinking What is this good for? What goal am I trying to achieve?) can be exactly the right kind of self-motivating strategy. Don’t get me wrong - blogging with a purpose is great. But the luxury of having no specific purpose in mind can be a good thing sometimes, especially when you’re starting to feel that blog writing is actually a burden, a chore that you have to take care of. Obviously, when you’re writing for an institution or in a professional context you are well-advised to think of your readers. But if you’re not enjoying what you do it’s bound to show sooner or later and it seems that with blogging, much of the pleasure that people draw from the activity is a direct result of its unfocusedness - a sort of ‘my blog is my castle’-attitude in communicative terms.
A friend once told me she preferred the original way of blogging: “rambling incoherently to yourself on the street”. Blogging doesn’t have to be quite that bad, but sometimes it helps to ramble just a bit.
