The Relationship of Blogging

I got around to thinking about blogging last week because a friend, J, had asked me to help her out with her upcoming college literary day. She was looking for a variety of speakers to talk to her college students and hopefully get them all fired up about oral and verbal aspects of the English language.
I am glad I grew up in the 80s. My life had fewer ‘distractions’ then. The only amusement I found was the TV but how interesting could RTM be? I’d wait for cartoon time in the evenings but that was all there was to TV. Maybe that pushed me towards other pursuits, like writing and reading.
But Writing is a harsh taskmaster, one that comes with its friend, Reading. If you don’t read, how can you improve your writing?
To cut a long story short, where I am today is a result of my voracious appetite for books. I’d spend time hunched up over books. I’d be daydreaming away, imagining what I’d be when I grow up. I even had an imaginary friend who wrote letters to me. We’d have conversations about school and homework.
That’s why blogging comes naturally to me. I am back in my little imaginary world again, talking to myself (yes, I have a proclivity for that and nope, I have all my marbles intact). I have ideas which need to be written down somewhere and a blog is the perfect place to air these ideas.
But above all, blogging is about relationships. By coming to my blog and reading what I have to say, you are starting a friendship somehow with me. I may not know you but if you leave me a comment, I’d get to know you better.
Through these years of blogging, I’ve made many friends online with my blog as the starting point. They’d read my blog and find time to pen me an email and we’d be friends. Simple as that. Because you’ve read my blog, you know me. You know what goes on in my head.
While IT is democratising the playing field for each and everyone of us, it is ironically bringing us back to where we started from. Humans crave connection. We try to find ‘faces’ in inanimate objects like clouds (now now, don’t tell me you’ve never imagined faces or animal shapes in passing clouds?), caves, mountains, water puddles. We often look for a human connection in everything. We humanise our pets too and many have (read about the two doggies getting married in today’s newspaper? I think that’s taking things too far, no?).
And so it is with the Internet. We love joining online forums. We like ‘talking’ to each other. And that’s what the blog is. The blog is just a space for humans to have ongoing conversations with each other albeit in a face-less environment. I enjoy the interaction, I enjoy the joy of putting words down to be read by people halfway around the world and I enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Without relationships, there’d be no blogs, no Friendsters, no MySpace, no Multiply.
What a sad world that would be!