Metablog (Y)

How many blogs on blogging are out there? (Any of you have a rough figure, a stat for me?) Well, here's another metablog for the count.

To think our borrowed words can travel through all these chutes and alleys in cyberspace unbeknownst to us, their foster parents. Like some spaceship, they may land on an unknown, foreign planetary monitor.

But see, blogging requires reading, yes, reading. And it would stand to reason that those who write must be reading as well. Chances are though, cyber reading is akin to scanning… A quick perusal, or a practice of—what I called—reading diagonally—a grad school survival tactic of mine (I mean who had time to read 1,000 pages a week?!) And when I read from the Internet, I do a bit of skimming, making an informational cappuccino of sorts, gleaning from the foam of perspectives. Back here, on the other side of this screen, in this bibliophilic Eden of mine, I do read differently, voraciously.

But when I scan and seek, I find that there is indeed a hunger to tell, and a quiet desire to be read… We're all writers, we're all photographers, we're all aspiring to be something. Something else. We all aspire to be visible, to make our selves visibly distinct in the morass of personas: we are all special.

There is an array of blog phylums—the political, the special interest, and the personal-journal, to list but a few. Specifically, with the diary-like blog—we create an illusion of sorts. We put our words, our thoughts out there—as a way of saying, "I exist." (The millennia's mantra? I blog, therefore, I am.) We do not shout, grab the mike, or ring a phone off the hook—no, instead, we quietly, patiently post. And perhaps, a friend, or even a fellow parvenu on the blogging scene will read these wee-hour thoughts, and post an obsequious comment in affirmation (or a bitter, hubristic pot shot at our humanity?).

We also create an illusion of communication. An ersatz dialogue—for it is masked as a monologic text, but akin to a letter or email, it needs—it begs for!—an audience. Neither the blog nor letter can be self-defining. It exists in relation to its readers, perhaps an old case of mauvaise-foi.

From the French essayer, to try out (to try out ideas), I suppose the blog has become, in a way, for this neophyte, the new essay. A literal site for putting ideas down, seeing one's thoughts through the other side of the rabbit hole, without interruption (because I —not my persona—do not like to compete for air time in real time conversations) and without the fear of boring one's company. S/he clicks on another window, and quietly slips away from this one…