Just can't get enough: On blogs and Peeping Toms

Where the urgency of the Internet can be suffocating for the perennially logged-on, blogging comes in as a haven of sorts — a port for the weary, file-laden user to rest his achy feet (or fingers, for that matter).

Indeed, the structure of social media has become such a speed demon that, if you aren’t tweeting every half hour or updating your Facebook profile at least once a day, you might as well have fallen off the face of the earth. Heck, we all know this, and that’s why the air we breathe is virtually infused with the scent of agitation (which, for some reason, smells like paint thinner to me).

Enter blogging.

As a form of social media in itself, blogging can be just as fast-paced as your other online activities, except that its existence isn’t regulated by an incessant need for speed. Unless you’re blogging for the news industry, of course. Meanwhile, Facebook and Twitter thrive on users interacting in real-time, ergo the pressure of the world being too much with us, to paraphrase William Wordsworth. Now with blogging, this isn’t quite so. For better or worse, one is given the freedom to update at her leisure without having to cave in to the pressures (and temptations) brought about by friends with an overload of notifications. Of course, no blog is complete without any followers — and really, what would be the point of posting it online then? — but either way, there remains a kind of sanctity about the blogosphere; a sense of it being a personal, and almost private, space.

To put it simply, then: Facebook is the baby you can’t not direct the bulk of your attentions to when online; and your blog is the old friend whom you can comfortably go back to visit at the most random and inopportune of moments.

Everything-Underneath-The-Sun Blogs

Truly, blogging has become such a cultural behemoth that you have everything from fandom blogs to how-to blogs to portfolio blogs to celebrity blogs to literary blogs to review blogs to catalogue blogs to everything-underneath-the-sun blogs. You get the picture. What started as a nondescript way of swapping links among web developers in the early ‘90s eventually became a full-blown pastime once the software was revamped and made open to the public.

Today, with all the latest features designed to further enhance and personalize the writing experience, the popularity of blogging has only increased. To add to that, according to a recent study by The Guardian, blog writers have actually been overtaken by the number of blog readers. Which brings me to the question oft-thought but never voiced: Just why are blogs so popular?

For many a blog user, the answer is relatively simple — blogging could be a form of expression, a way to interact with people all over the web, an online identity that can be shaped and augmented at will. And while an essential idea behind blogging is the posting of personal thoughts, experiences, and sentiments, there remains the fact that these thoughts are meant to be consumed by a reading public.

Thus, one great myth behind blogging is that you’re only writing for yourself. Sure, you design your blog according to what you feel says the most about your personality, but the fact is, unknowingly or not, you’re taking into account would-be readers as well. We write and post and upload always with an audience in mind; be they friends, business associates, orgmates, family members, or the anonymous reader we never knew we had in the first place. Hence, on that note, blogging is so popular because it helps satisfy such a basic need of humanity, namely the need to be given attention, and, more essentially, the need to be heard.

In a similar vein, the increasing number of blog readers is just as astounding. Chalk it up to web-surfing boredom, deep-rooted feelings of (coerced?) loyalty to a particular blogger, or just plain, genuine interest in what’s being discussed; the fact of the matter is that most readers just keep coming back. If blogs are the consummation of one’s most personal thoughts and experiences, why do we keep reading? And it’s not limited to only reading about the adventures of our closest friends; you might be amazed at the number of people who diligently follow blogs owned by celebrities, or at least by the erstwhile stranger who thoroughly charmed them at a bar. The best part is, these bloggers don’t even have to know all the people who actually read them.

And there’s the rub. We’ve become cultural voyeurs, taking pleasure in the illicit observation of someone else’s intimate acts; and the Internet has become the medium through which these acts become exposed to a potentially unlimited number of others. Taking out the sexual aspect of it, we’re no different from Peeping Toms… and the unguardedness and unawareness of the bloggers we read only add to the observer’s (i.e. our) thrill.

Are we the masters of our own blog-reading experience, or are we mere spectators, attempting to live vicariously through the blogs we consume?

 It’s something to chew on, certainly, the next time we log on to a favorite blog site.