I blog therefore I am? Descartes probably wouldn't approve - and I'm not sure I do, but it's where I'll start today.
The famous quote about the nature of humankind - that defines our relationship to the world around us, and also manages to define us as a 'unique' species, and it posits that it is our conception of ourselves that gives validity to our state of being. In other words because we can think we can know ourselves as individual and therefore we are able to 'be' individuals in a collective society. In doing so Descartes also notes that our key feature as homo sapiens is our ability to conceptualise - or to theorise our place in the world. Okay this is a pretty glib definition - but them I am about to seagueway into talking about blogs, watch.
In blogging (see) there is also this need to define and express 'uniqueness' - but a uniqueness that is shared with others, to whom you paradoxically look for a connection. In this sense the blog is curiously public-personal, a form that asks for you to confess your inner quirks, show the workings of the mind in the hope that these will be echoed or shared by others whom you have never met. In many ways an art form that seems as dubious as reality TV - I mean my issues are my issues, how interesting can they really be? But I guess the content is not the point. I write my blogs to define my relationship to the world - an expression of who I am, what I am trying to do with my life, and as an expression of my emotional outpouring. I could as easily write to critique the body politic, the world military-industrial complex, to decry the criminality of world capitalism or to cry out for a sense of individual space in an online world. Equally my frustration with department stores, my love of food or animals are subjects that I could dwell on - though all I could create the architecture in which my ‘self’ can exist.
It is all ego naturally. In all these acts the act of blogging allows the blogger to construct the world around them, and importantly defines their relationship to that world. My notions of success and failure, my moral laundry, all these place me in relation to a society that I recognise and reaffirm in my understanding. Of course to do that is to pronounce my own individuality, and in this way my blog screams 'look at me' it cries out the old refrain 'I am!’, but also asks the question - ‘am I?’