Leah, Me and the Banal Blogosphere

A week into this blog business and I’m beginning to learn many things about the virtual “blogosphere”. Anyone can start up a blog on any subject they choose. I’ve seen blogs focusing on celebrity news, one that keeps track of sports scores and several that publish photographs.

There is; however, a large number of people who use their webspace to create a diurnal register of personal minutiae (“Rob told me he didn’t like my haircut. He said that heavyset women should wear their hair long. I told him that we weren’t dating anymore, so he had no say in the matter”).* And there is an inordinate amount of photographs of people’s pets.

In her column** this week, Leah McLaren decides to log out of the blogosphere due to the fact that it is “spectacularly boring.” Couldn’t agree with her more for a large part of the blogs out there. However, I do disagree with her contention that bloggers blog because what they have to say is unfit for publication. I don’t think a lot of bloggers have any intention of attempting to publish what they’ve written on their blog in print media. The sole purpose of many blogs is to document and thus validate the lives of the bloggers. They probably don’t have anyone else listening to what they have to say and the internet provides a vast and incalculable audience.

If you read my previous post about Ms. McLaren, you might be starting to wonder if I have asked myself the question, do I blog because I can’t get published? (Do I teach because I can’t do?)

My intention from the start was to get myself writing more frequently and to hone my skills. I maintain a blog for much of the same reasons as David Eddie, a writer mentioned in the column: blogging is “a good way to limber up.” Just as athletes stretch and jog to warm up, writers practise their craft through a less regulated and stylized medium.

So am I a spiteful blogger? Am I one of those “bitter unpublished writers venomously slagging published ones”?

No. I simply document the daily trivialities that occur in my life which include, but are not limited to, reading and responding to other pieces of writing.

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*paraphrased from an actual blog author navigated quickly away from; name has been changed due to author’s faulty memory

**Leah's Feb. 25th column available here:

Leah McLaren



PS. Here’s a picture of my friend’s dog – isn’t she so cute?!?!