No, this is how it works

In about a month, this here blog will turn 10. While I switched hosting sites a few years ago, I've been running "The Vale" -- named in reference to a circa-1980s fantasy-novel series I read as a teenager -- since December 2003. (Anyone who has actually followed this blog since its inception, by the way, simultaneously earns my appreciation, sympathy, and mild suspicion.)

I'm occasionally reminded of the fact that, in keeping and maintaining a blog, I'm participating in a humorously outdated activity. When I started this blog, it was during the heyday of personal blogging, in ye olde early-aughts, when people were still IMing and using Kazaa, before Facebook made it easier to be attention-seeking with less writing or forethought. I was in high school, and everyone I knew had an uncomfortably confessional LiveJournal or Xanga. These days, for the most part, blogs have gone professional. You have food blogs and fashion blogs and wedding blogs and car blogs and blogs dedicated to people doing everyday activities incorrectly. While I'm sure there are still teenagers out there using personal blogs to share emo poetry, there aren't many people my age who continue to see blogging as worth their time. 

Those of us who have stuck with personal blogging, predictably, tend to be the people who would identify as casual writers. (Not to be confused with the capital-w Writers who seek legitimacy and talk about "craft" and, I assume, wear fedoras.) Personal bloggers, in my experience, are the non-aspirational, little-w writers who simply find the act of writing enjoyable, even if we don't have anything in particular to say or anyone in particular we need to say it to. It's a dabbler's hobby. Historically, such material got recorded and promptly forgotten in obscure private diaries. The Internet provides a forum for making casual writing public, but most personal bloggers still don't have any real investment in the readership or publicity of our blogs. What's appealing about the "public" aspect of a blog is that it acts as a spur -- the mostly imaginary "obligation" we have to our "readers" -- which keeps us writing and laziness at bay. In the end, maintaining a personal blog, like doing yoga or cultivating a flower garden or other yuppie pursuits, functions primarily as a self-enriching activity.

Unlike yoga, though, blogging is a self-enrichment activity that gives back. I love reading other peoples' personal blogs and sincerely miss the days when more of my friends maintained them -- not because I'm nosy (although I totally am), but because blogs offer a very particular kind of window into another person's mind. Reading a personal blog isn't like reading a diary -- the writer quite obviously has no expectation of privacy and instead invites readership -- but the content is still personal and unrepentantly self-centered to a degree that is shunned in pretty much all professional writing. In a blog, you're allowed to be confusing, uninteresting, self-indulgent, mundane -- qualities that are typically excised out of even the most personal professional writing, like memoir.

Most uniquely, what you see in a personal blog is a weird mix of honest disclosure and crafted self-representation: everyone expects a blog to maintain a certain level of truth and sincerity, but at the same time it allows the writer to put forth his or her desired self. Blogs inevitably scream, "This is what I want you to think I'm like!" Reading a personal blog grants you privileged access into the writer's freaky little mind-world, (you often learn things in blogs that you're not likely to learn anywhere else), but your access is sanctioned and controlled by the writer. It offers the experience of trespassing without trespassing. From this standpoint, blogging is a social rather than selfish gesture, since writers are capitalizing on quasi-private/quasi-public conventions to open themselves to other people in a different way.

Well, anyway. Happy decade-versary, blog. Apparently I have not yet tired of you.

Bonus list: Other things that were invented/introduced in 2003:

  - The Iraq War

  - The DaVinci Code (the book)

  - MythBusters and NCIS

  - Camera phones

  - Love Actually

  - SARS