The power of blogging is not that it allows us to broadcast our voice and ideas to many people, but that it supports human scale interactions, dialogues between and among people that wouldn’t otherwise happen. This is what Jeneane Sessum has called M2Y, me to you, and it’s what ProBlogger Darren Rowse wrote about today when he reminds us that individuals read our blog posts, not crowds, even if we have huge traffic numbers.
We cannot be fully human without dialogue. From The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor:
We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. For purposes of this discussion, I want to take “language” in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the “languages” of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we are inducted into these in exchange with others. No one acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own. We are introduced to them through exchanges with others who matter to us–what George Herbert Mead called “significant others.” The genesis of the human mind is in this sense not “monological,” not something each accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical.
Big media outlets have it wrong when they claim that blogging is either (1) narcissistic, because it’s only about the sound of your own voice or (2) worthless, because most blogs only have a few readers.
It’s not the scale that matters, it’s the dialogue. Even when comments are few, it’s still dialogue, because writing for an audience means you’re always thinking in terms of that audience’s response. You think outside yourself and beyond yourself, about how you can make a connection to another person. A blog is not just a diary, locked up and meant only for its author.
At a time when most social forces push towards disintegration of community and deteriorating dialogue, we should celebrate how the web has the potential to do just the opposite. And so we are.
2 Comments
Thank you for this Anne. I write a blog myself that has a very small readership of friends and family. I have questioned why I write sometimes, as I don’t want to pursue enveavours that are vain. However, this articulates my motivations perfectly.
And thank you for the comment! I have been really impressed at how blogging brings me closer to my family and friends and to people I otherwise wouldn’t have met. Sure, it can be narcisstic, but more often the underlying motivation is a wish to connect.