In Defense of Blogging

(Or Tweeting or Instagramming or Facebook Statuses)

Of late, I have been hearing rather a lot about people blogging and tweeting and facebooking and instagramming- and much has been made of the quality of the posts on offer, and why we are doing what we are doing and should we be doing something different, like may be writing a book, which, ostensibly would be a better utilization of our time. One frequent explanation proffered for this deluge of status updates (whether in a few words on FB/Twitter, on via pics on instagram or via eloquent posts or incoherent rants on blogs and other such fora) is that we all seek to massage our egos- the breakdown of this argument being that such posts/updates are essentially a reminder to the world of the arrival of the person posting it- ‘Hey, I am here! Are you?’ While I do not completely rule that sentiment out, I am not in full agreement with it, either. I believe that this is a more primal need- a need to communicate with like minded people, a yearning for dialogue and approval from what one perceives as one’s peer group- in an ironic twist, the more our lives are becoming compartmentalized and insular, the greater our need to communicate seems to be.

The other day I was reading an essay by Salman Rushdie dealing with the themes of emigrant literature, history and the role of literature in society. These are big themes, and not relevant to the topic I am trying to briefly tackle here, but his explanation of ‘who’ do we write for seems to me to be pertinent to the current discussion:

“This raises immediately the question of whom one is writing ‘for’. My own, short answer is that I have never had a reader in mind. I have ideas, people, events, shapes, and I write ‘for’ those things, and hope that the completed work will be of interest to others. But which others? In the case of Midnight’s Children I certainly felt that if its subcontinental readers had rejected the work, I should have thought it a failure, no matter what the reaction in the West. So I would say that I write ‘for’ people who feel part of the things I write ‘about’: but also for everyone else whom I can reach.” (emphasis mine)

The context is different, but the parts I have put in bold above seem, to me, to apply to every scrap of writing or tweeting or status updating that is done for public consumption. And the need for finding that empathy is also a large part (apart from the egotism) of why we write*.

As an aside, a lot of people complain about information overload and signal-noise ratios in the age of the web. I disagree; I have long believed that more than an information problem, what we have on our hands is a problem of effective filtering. 

Your thoughts are welcome.

*This, here, is about personal (i.e. unaffiliated/individual, for want of a better word) writing for public consumption, and I do not presume to include the writing of literature or journalism in the ambit of these narrow, individualistic causes/motives of writing.

P.S. The Rushdie quote is from a 1982 essay called Imaginary Homelands, which can be found on the London Review of Books. There might be a free subscription requirement.