After starting my blog, I read hundreds of other blogs and followed quite a few. I didn’t anticipate what I encountered, people looking for a place to belong, people who needed somewhere to vent. Some of these people had found friendships they couldn’t develop in the three-dimensional realm. A lot of us are really co-dependent.
Someone said, “With Facebook, there’s a lot of psychological stuff going on.” I extend that observation to blogging. I size up someone’s personality from their blogging habits. In the blogosphere, I see approval-seekers, trend-followers, and those who blog in certain communities because they feel that they belong – it’s a place where certain people finally feel popular. Sometimes the sharing is intense, and at times I wonder, when the bloggers disappear from the ‘sphere, if they are okay, as they had talked about experiencing severe depression.
I am fortunate to have close friends that I can share personal things with, though some people consider the people that they meet in the blogosphere to be friends, and they are fulfilled by those relationships. I’m not opposed to forming friendships with bloggers, but I have to be able to smell, touch and hear you – I have to know you a couple of years, and to be able to read your aura before making that blood pact. I don’t use the word “friend” loosely.
The blogging environment can be affected, and there is playacting. Behind the wall, there’s no shame in blowing things up pretty big – you can hide behind a persona – be that tough girl, the femme fatale (I think I tried to play that one up a couple of times – hahaha!). There are professional bloggers. But some of us take blogging a little too seriously.
In the 1800s, Washington Irving described the flood of “writers” with their pretenses at the proliferation of printing houses – ha! I wonder what he’d think today when everyone and their mother can claim literary importance with the multitude of outlets — myself included.
In the blogosphere, alternate universes are created. Some people imagine that they’re larger than life. But WordPress hosts thousands of sites, and bloggers are a dime a dozen. A blogger actually did once describe us as “dime-a-dozen-bloggers”, and I loved it – it put us in our place. We all have different angles, and some are actually great writers. Most of us are in the middle, and some of us are awful. I don’t even make a big deal out of new followers, because 97% of the time, they don’t even “like” or comment. They’re just trolling for followers. I do enjoy a lot of blogs, but I have to have a balance with my real life and with the real world.
I don’t want to lose perspective. The blogosphere is a place for me to share dime-a-dozen thoughts, to practice writing, and to trade comments. I remind myself of this, otherwise I can delude myself into thinking I’m Sandor-the-Barbarian, destined to rule a demented corner of the blogosphere.
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