3735515818_c41e68fe95Blogging: does it have therapeutic benefits for the blogger? Writing has always been thought of as a cathartic process. The sheer act of scribing words onto paper (or nowadays, a computer screen) is generally purported to have a cleansing, liberating quality that fosters the organization of thought, improves clarity of purpose and frees the imagination to dress the message in palatable clothing. How does blogging in particular, as opposed to writing in general, aid in this?

Well, one could say it is because of the feedback one gets from one’s readers. Whereas professional hard copy writers tend to have to rely on critics reviewing their work at a much later date, blogging feedback is almost immediate, and from a much broader scope. The readers of a blog tend not to be of one particular socio-economic genus, or educational or professional background, so the discussions one sparks and engages in can span the gamut of society.

There is never going to be a consensus of opinion. The outlying sentiments will inevitably be hopelessly off-the-wall, because that is usually what outlying opinions are. Sure, an extremely small percentage may contain an element of genius, which is an excuse all outliers invariably tend to offer to disguise the rampant goofiness behind their curious views.

If the advent of the internet has demonstrated anything to me, it is that there is a surprisingly large number of really quite strange and staggeringly stupid people in the world. They hitherto had obviously been restricted to communicating via hand-written notes on their food plates passed under the doors to their mothers’ basements, or by tapping on the pipes with their toy squeaky hammer. Pervasive (and pretty much free) global communication has eradicated this perfectly adequate form of information exchange and obliged normal folk (of no blood relation) to experience the kind of conversations only an incompetent mother should have to tolerate as punishment for her lackluster parenting.

And some of them are so rude. The fuzzy comfort of anonymity that protects people posting on the internet is, to me, a mainline to knowing their true character. If anonymity encourages someone to behave objectionably, then we can easily (and extremely accurately) extrapolate to how they are in real life. In a word: undesirable. You know how an attention-starved dog will do something he knows is wrong because he knows it will elicit a response, and a negative response is better than none at all? Like that.

Stay close for Part II, on Friday 26th of February.

 

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