Sunday, November 14, 2010

I've never actually written a blog before. To be quite honest I've always considered blogging to be the realm of emotional teenagers with too much angst who think their lives are terrible when in reality they have it going pretty well and political ideologues who constantly shout so loud about their opinions that most reasonable stop listening. After reading an article for a research paper I was required to write for a class, my attitude shifted. No, I did not have an epiphany. No light shined down upon me from on high, and no radical change occurred in my life. In fact, it was a quite unspectacular moment in all respects.

I do not recall the name of the article, but it was about the changing nature of the written word. More specifically it was about how written self narratives (a fancy word diary) are actually a mechanism to reinforce one's own identity. While I'm not certain that specific argument holds as much water as the author of the article would have liked you to believe, the author defended his/her assertion with a great deal of qualitative research. As part of the author's study he/she went out and interviewed people who had compiled self narratives in both written and/or electronic forms. One of the interviewees made a statement that I had never thought about before, and that was the point of their blog was not that others would read it and would empathize with what she had written. Instead her blog was meant for her as a way to work things out in her own mind. Because putting something down and words was a huge mental forward when compared to simply trying to reason things out in her own mind. That thoughts written once written down have a concreteness that can not be so easily changed or dismissed. Unlike ideas or thoughts the written word is strong and unchangeable. For the young lady being interviewed writing things out and then being able to read them again offered her a sense of clarity she could not gain otherwise. It is in this mindset that I decided to start my own blog to see if it would offer me that same clarity. If it does, then that is wonderful. If it does not, then I have not lost anything but some of my own time. I could not care less if I were the only one in the world that ever read of a word of what I put down here. My ego is not so big as to think that what I have to say matters to anyone else but myself. This is merely for my own edification.   

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