Saturday, December 10, 2005

Still on the egocentrism argument

Fawlen's comment reminds me what a hare-brained first post that was, beginning a potentially contestable statement and leaving it hanging. So let me continue. When I posited that blogging is basically a self-centered enterprise, don't mistake that for a negative judgment on the whole blogging population. Fellow bloggers, I am not necessarily saying that you are all self-centered and are bad bad people. Uh uh. I'm just saying it as it is. One blogs primarily for oneself, does one not?

Let me put it this way: why does one blog? To express herself, to update her family and friends about goings-on in her life (whether truthful or fictional), to promote oneself or one's profession, to meet new people, mayhap to stumble upon one's soulmate *barf*, to make a statement, to develop one's writing skills, or personality *cough*, to "talk aloud to no one in particular", as fawlen says, or to tell the world, or a random glazy-eyed creature out there sitting in front of a monitor in a dingy room who stumbles upon any number of odd publicly-listed blogs, "Pssst, I blog therefore I'm alive! Notice me!". So. Blogging is essentially an attempt at self-perpetuation. The very fact of self makes all this egocentric. It's sort of a circular thing, imo - there's nothing to contest.

Let's not ascribe any noble intentions here, the bottomline is, I don't blog for you guys, I blog for me! Which sounds kinda looney, but if you think about it, why do you bother to e-mail friends? Sure, because they want you to tell them what's going on. And why would you want to do that? Because you want them to know about you. It's still about you, see? Which, I reiterate, is not necessarily bad. Just as long as you don't spend hours reading through your own blog, marvelling at how interesting you are. If you do that, plus comment on your own blog using your other web personas, well brother, it might be a good idea to get out a bit more.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I absolutely adore the nice paradox of a solipsistic blog.

[What is it you were telling me about LJs the other day?...... *heavy irony*]

*whistles and ducks*

The Contessa
*signs cause she takes responsibility and doesn't want I. to castigate others*

imogen_ph said...

contessa, what paradox? ;-)

isa, sanity check (i mean mine): what am i thinking right now? (just to see if you're not a figment of my imagination. ;-))

Anonymous said...

"Just as long as you don't spend hours reading through your own blog, marvelling at how interesting you are. If you do that, plus comment on your own blog using your other web personas, well brother, it might be a good idea to get out a bit more."

hahaha! I couldn't agree with you more:)

imogen_ph said...

it's my little stuffed neko-bus (my brother got it for me from japan), a character from My Neighbor Totoro, see here:

http://www.wingsee.com/ghibli/totoro/characters.html

isn't he cute?