Why Do We Blog?
Blogging has been a part of my routine for years now. Six days a week I sit with my laptop, often long before the sun rises, and type out a post.
No small commitment, but it is a commitment that many of us have made. Three, five, seven posts a week, sometimes even more. The blogosphere is constantly marching forward, always growing, always adding new content, more voices and opinions.
But why do we choose to add our small voices to the roar?
This question is partly sparked by some recent reflections on the way I go about blogging, but mostly it is sparked by curiosity. Curiosity about your stories, about the people on the other side of the blogs I read, and those who read here.
So, any of you who blog – why do you do it?
What motivates you to write post after post, to share your opinions, experiences, and life with the blogosphere?
Mason,
I love this … Can I share this on my blog? I don’t blog near as much as you, but started due to homesickness. Now I blog for my family back in MI so they can see what I’m up to. I blog about cooking, hiking, projects, work, and more because all of the above has helped me get over being so far away from home. Hope you are doing well and happy belated birthday!
Feel free. We miss seeing you both, and thank you for the card!
For me, the motivations for blogging have changed slightly over time. It started as a way to keep in touch with friends and family back home while I attended graduate school, and as a way to process “out loud” what I was learning in my studies. Over the last five years, it has kind of morphed and included more book reviews, discussion of issues that come up in church life, random reflections on faith and culture, etc.
I suppose, if I’m honest, there are two common threads that run throughout—one that I’m proud of, one that I’m not: a) I love writing; and b) I love attention. Not particularly flattering, but inescapably true. On my better days (and my better posts, it is to be hoped), my love of writing plays more of a role than my love of attention
This second paragraph is me all over. I love the written word. I love the way words help me process things. I love seeing thoughts coalesce into coherent paragraphs. Blogging gives me a form, a structure, and a discipline to keep working on that aspect of my creativity. But I certainly love the attention, too.
Honestly, I blog because I have felt God prompt me too. It is a chance to think and reflect. It is a chance to write which I love. I know God wants me writing more. I don’t know why or for what purpose, but he has prompted me to do it. So I blog.
Seeing the number of hits increase is great and it makes me feel good. I try not to stress when they aren’t big and I try to focus on why I’m doing it (for God) more than I do the excitement of seeing more people reading. Some days are better than others.
I started blogging because we moved and wanted to stay in touch with friends. That was 2005-2008. But in 2008, I decided to just write, like how I wanted to write, about things I cared too much about – mothering, spirituality, faith, church, politics, everything you’re not supposed to talk about in polite society – and have been doing that for years now. Now I blog because I would lose my mind without the creative outlet, for the community I’ve found online, for the discipline, for the spiritual discovery. Sometimes I don’t know what I think until I write. Every day, the reason shifts and changes, and some days I don’t know if I should continue but I keep at it, I keep finding God here.
I, like Sarah, started a blog as a sort of group email. I could keep in touch with multiple friends in the same place.
Now I write because it’s how I process and learn and communicate. When I am learning or wrestling with something, I write about it. When I want to tell a story about our lives, I write it. I don’t have a very unique voice in the blogosphere, but then again every life is unique. So, I don’t expect to have a huge blog or a huge audience, but I do wish to communicate with a circle of people who are processing life and want to do it together in this blog community.
With that in mind, I don’t feel pressure to post all the time, but simply to post what needs to be communicated.
I started to blog on the recommendation of a friend who said it’d be a good place to help me organise and think through whatever was running through my head. I find it gives it (at least a little) structure and I enjoy trying to write stuff that is interesting to other people, not just myself (though the later is my [primary motivation). However, I think I need to think through a bit more how I run it if I want to take it more seriously.
I’ve also been finding that, generally speaking, for people my age in ‘the Christian subculture’ of Northern Ireland not many people have ever thought/know how to think about some of the stuff I blog about sometimes (I hope that doesn’t sound as arrogant as I think it might). So to some degree I feel a certain amount of responsibility to do it for the very few people who might bother to click on my links.