Blog, Huh? Why?

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The recent spate of events with bloggers getting charged and the negative publicity about blogging and bloggers somehow made me realize how misunderstood a bunch of people we are. Yes, I used the word "we" because I do identify myself as a blog-tizen (not sure whether there is this word) and I find that it is my responsibility to come forth to clear the air in my own capacity, before something drastic happens.

The Question
At the back of my mind, I was thinking, why do people blog and are bloggers necessary incorrigible, loathsome troube-makers? My answer? Probably... just as there are black sheeps in society, some bloggers just give the blogging world a bad name and misrepresents blog-tizens at large.

The Motivation
Why am I even concerned about this topic? Well, I must say that I have gone through a bad patch a few months ago and I must that my blog did play a part in helping me get back on my feet again, thus I see the value of blogging. Hence, with all the bad publicity about blogging; the government charging 2 bloggers, schools clamming down on students blogging etc, I just feel the urge to, as the chinese saying goes, "return justice" to the blogging world. Technology has its pros and cons and blogging is no different. As a saying in "Spiderman - The Movie" goes: with power (and freedom) comes great responsibility. Even the most useful tool / invention can be used unjustly and irresponsibly.

The Disclaimer
Of course, I do not profess that I know everything about blogging (after all I am still new to blogging being only 2 months old in the blogging world) and I do not have research to back up what I say here but what I am sharing here is just my own take on the matter; a small fragment of many other perspectives on blogging.

The Basic Idea
You can really understand bloggers by looking at their purpose for blogging... this should form the basis for judgment when deciding whether blogging is good or bad (or should even be banned or not). If you are a blogger, ask yourself: what goes into my blog? why do I blog?

I see bloggers belonging to a continuum from one end where bloggers maintain blogs with the purpose of "sharing" to another end where the bloggers maintain blogs with the purpose of "advancing their own agenda".

The Good Side - Sharing... Your Day
Let's look at the good side. I think the most common purpose people maintain seems to be the because people want to share their lives and day with others (sometimes with close friends, sometimes with strangers). These people chronicle how their days had been as well as interesting events, phenomena and observations.

The Good Side - Sharing... Your Perspective
Some people goes a step further and share their perspective of things and matters. After all, we are all humans and we have a brain, don't we? A brain that is capable of processing what we see, hear and experience (through taste, touch, smell). And since all of us have different life experiences with different upbringing (being "wired" by parents to think about things or approach things in a particular way), we all bring with us different ways of looking at the same thing. Think of photography: you will get different effects when you position to shoot in different angles or when you use different kind of lenses to shoot the photos (sometimes exaggerating the subject of photography). It is healthy, at least in my opinion, when we recognize this and share our "unique" perspective of things with others.

The Good Side - Sharing... Your Lessons
Some go even a step further and share lessons they have learnt about life. From the various observations and perspectives, he/she may draw general conclusions about life and share these with the readers of his/her blog. We may not know it but we all carry with us a "roadmap" that helps us navigate through the "journey of life", theories about how things work and how things should be, how people should behave and how we should behave, how people would think and how we would think. Again lessons work for different people in different ways; some may have different life experiences and different lifestyles and the lessons may work or may not work for them, nevertheless the lessons highlighted in the person's blog is still one which works for the person.

The Good Side - Sharing... Your Reflections
Some use blogs to help reflect on things that have happened to them, believing that everything that happens have a meaning or can have a meaning/lesson derived from it. Much like a diary, it chronicles the events, feelings, perspective at any point in time. This story of your life will evoke different kind of feelings at different points in time when you come back to read it again and again. Some use it as a kind of reminder of their life experiences and their priorities in life. The blog can be a very powerful textbook of your life and can be used for you to make sense of your life.

The Good Side - Sharing... Ideas & Knowledge
There are even others who use blogs for constructive reasons, tapping on the power of collectiveness, to share ideas, knowledge, create new things etc. There is a common shared understanding of the purpose of the blog and everyone contributes in a way or another (although there may be "leechers" who just suck ideas and knowledge and not share).

The Good Side - Helping you/others feel understood
Seemingly having its ancestry in the diary, a blog can also be a powerful tool in helping to be one's outlet. I think there is no doubt we live in a stressful world and we constantly seek to be understood. It can feel lonely at times when it seems no one understands you and especially for these people, blogs can give you a sense of being understood (since there is the comments component where people can either make you feel affirmed or worst just because they condemn your post). But one thing remains true, we should always remember that what is in a blog is a reflection of the person's own world and we should respect that.

In Short
In short, a blog, used constructively helps captures (i) the day in the life of... , (ii) observations, (iii) perspectives, (iv) lessons or theories, (v) reflections and meanings, (vi) ideas and knowledge, and/or (vii) affirmations and shares them.

I think we all know moderation is the key and too much of something maybe bad. For example:

The Bad Side - Ego-Centrism
Using the blog to chronicle even the most minute detail of a blogger's life relfects dependency on the blog and the danger of being too self-centred... that the whole world revolves around that blogger and that "everyone wants to know about his/her life". Too much of a voice for oneself is also unhealthy.

Blogs, with is potential to reach out to a lot of people, can also be used to selfishly advance one's own agenda. For example:

The Bad Side - Getting Back @ Others
Some use blogs to bitch about people they don't like. Some use the blog to "expose" the injustice done to them to the whole world, trying to win people to their side by presenting their one sided perspective of things. Worse, some bloggers even engage in blog wars, hurling abuses and allegations at one another, in the process gaining more motivation to continue when by-standers contribute comments to their post, encouraging them or condemning them.

The Bad Side - Preaching One's Way as THE Way
Using the blog to "preach" that one's perspective of things is the correct way of looking at things. Having an alternative view is good and it helps people to think about things and draw their own conclusions but how good is a perspective when it tries to drown others in the process, failing to note the positives of a situation, only highlighting the negatives.

The Bad Side - Adopting an Alternative Persona
There is no way of confirming how many really does this but I think it is possible that some adopts an alternative persona in their blog, behaving very differently from who they are in real life. Blogging literally allows one to be who he/she wants and to behave how he/she wants to (which would not be possible in real life). It also allows them to be creative and create fictional world(s) and fictional events, all the while packaged in a way that this is a real blog of a real person. There is of course, in my opinion, a danger of leading 2 lives and losing touch with his/her real self or even worst, an increasing dissatisfaction of his/her own life.

Final Words
There is thus a "think" line to tread between having a "healthy" blog vs an "unhealthy" blog. Of course, I do not think there is a blog that can purely fit into one of the above categories, more so like a mixture of these components.

So where is your blog on the continuum?