Why blogs are a good thing.

I think blogs are a good thing. That’s not really a radical position for a blogger to take, I know. It may seem that it bears no explanation but I’m going to explain anyway because I’m a blogger and it’s kinda what I do.

Blogging is good for historians.

Blogs are a form of journal writing and journals have proven to be incredibly useful tools for historians. The fact that people who want to understand a wide range of public thought and reaction to major events now don’t have to wait until the writers die or are far enough removed from those events they feel comfortable publishing their thoughts in the form of a memoir (often by semi-ruining the information with what Shakespeare called ‘the pale cast of thought’ or what I call retrospective introspection) is, I think, a good thing. With the magic of blogging, you gather information on the immediate thoughts and feelings of people from vastly different walks of life by doing a simple Google search.

Blogging is good for bloggers.

People who are intimidated by a bound book of empty pages demanding to be filled can often find blogging a vastly more approachable medium. The fact that you are often writing to an audience encourages perseverance and persistence when many would have otherwise given up on writing a journal. Why is that good for bloggers? Because journaling and blogging create a scenario in which we actually sit down and think about our lives and the world around us. We take the time to consider events and how they might be affecting our feelings, leanings and even world view. This allows us to learn more from our successes and failures and about ourselves. The ability to look back and read past blogs allows us to understand the reasons we came to certain conclusions at the time we drew those conclusions. Believe it or not, the ability to objectively revisit emotionally motivated logic is an incredibly affective tool in the process of refining the series of beliefs and principles that make up our person.

Blogging is good for readers.

I mentioned historians because they’re a special case and reading doesn’t necessarily describe what they do with journals/blogs; with them it’s more like dissecting and discerning. A reader just sort of takes it in.

Blogging is good for readers in exactly the opposite way objective presentation of facts is good for readers. Objective presentations allow us the freedom to look at facts and form independent opinions. Blogging is good because it not only exposes us to vastly arrayed differences of opinion; it often shows us the process the writer’s thoughts took to come to those opinions. Thus, we not only are presented with a differing point of view but also the reasoning and facts that led to that point of view. We get to see that people who disagree with us don’t do so because they’re just deceived/deceivers with a malicious predisposition etc. There is a whole life’s history that goes into each person’s views on life, the universe and everything and readers get to see that. This causes us to be more sympathetic of those other experiences and, better, to learn from those experiences.

It’s like making plans to place your hand on a hot stove and then reading an account of what happened when someone else did the same thing. By reading the thoughts and experiences of others, you can save yourself.

Another way of putting it might be this: Life is a mine field and our experiences form the map we use to traverse it. As I move forward, I either develop theories about where mines are located or determine through painful experience exactly where mines are located. By reading of the experiences of others, I not only can learn the exact location of some mines, I can also gain knowledge that refines my theories about where possible mines are located. My map only covers a small part of the field. Blogging is, in effect, sharing my map with the world. Reading blogs is allowing the world to add to my map and refine it. The end result hopefully being that I step on fewer mines and live a longer, happier life.

Blogging is good for the world.

I love the movie A Far Off Place. There is a scene at the beginning of the film where Reese Witherspoon’s character is arguing with her father about the ethicacy and efficacy of two different approaches to the problem of poaching. He believes in addressing it peacefully and she believes in hunting down the poachers and shooting them.

Nonie: You know, Dad, people need to stand up and fight for what they believe in, or things will never change.

Nonie’s Dad: People need to sit down and talk, or people will never change.

I think blogging is yet another wonderful chance for global communication. I get to sit at my computer and read the inner thoughts of a teenager in the U.K., a world-wise woman in the Netherlands or a struggling musician on the East Coast of the U.S. There are so many different people with so many different paths and points of view. The ability to share the world with them and be aware of the fact that I share this world with them is an amazing gift; one that should be shared.