Apropos of blogging

When viewing my or anyone else's blog, there's an option to click the "Next Blog" button at the top. This will lead on a never-ending stream of blogs. One after the other. One person's attempts to validate his or life through documentation and publishing on the internet. I found it interesting how many of the blogs were run by women. Maybe it's not that surprising. Many of them were "mommy blogs" documenting their child's trips to the pumpkin patch or commenting on how funny or clever they can be. All of which I, and most people without kids, find extremely boring.

But why the need to share with the world. I watched a TED talk on our ever-present existence on the Internet. Particularly, what will happen to all of this content that we disperse into the digital cosmos after we die. This particular speaker suggested that in the future, we may be able to compile all of the tweets, facebook and blog posts and create a digitized version of ourselves that can interact with surviving friends and family members. You would be interacting with what the collection of random thoughts that I decide to post. The computer would anticipate my most likely responses based on the data from my on-line personae.

I write on this blog because writing is a discipline. I read and wrote and synthesized so much information in college. I had discussion with and interacted with people way smarter than me on a daily basis. This blog is a way for me to keep in the discipline or writing. Why do other people write on blogs? Who is reading all of these. I could spend a lifetime hitting the "Next Blog" button and never reach the end of the endless stream of people's daily thoughts, poems, pictures and personal anecdotes.

What's the point of attempting to document one's life as it occurs for the world to read? Tweets are now archived in the Library of Congress. But who would ever want to read some 200 million tweets that people post everyday? It would take you ten years to read all of the tweets posted in a single day. Would this provide you with a snapshot of what the entire tweeting world was doing and thinking in that one particular moment in history? I take time out of my day, often passing time at stoplights or during my lunch break at work, reading tweets. This lets me catch up on news and weather, sometimes a comedian will make me laugh or I'll find out some bit of news about a band I follow. But what will these tweets, blog posts and facebook updates look like in the future? Will anyone care?

In the future, instead of reading all the tweets anyone had ever written, there will probably be a timeline of trending topics by region around the world illustrating the important topics of the day. On January 20, 2012, there will be a speck with "Etta James" on it, indicating that people were talking about her death on Twitter that day. Of all the thousands of people that posted emotional or clever tweets about the soul singer that day, a point in a graph will be all that is left. So why do we do it? Why do we want to be a part of the endless, global, digital conversation that is the social networking world? Proof that we existed? Proof that we were clever and wanted the world to know it?

Our ancestors felt the same way we do. They painted pictures of what they were doing on the walls of caves. Given that they were nomadic hunter/gatherers, they weren't hanging a picture in their respective houses. They were documenting a part of their lives that was very important to them. "Look how clever I am! I killed an animal with a spear!" They painted it, left their signature, often a hand print, then moved on. Is this the equivalent of a tweet or a facebook post? I guess the need to leave a trace has always been there. Of course, not every member of "early man" felt like cave tweeting, just like not everyone today feels the need to Check In on Four Square or post a picture every time their baby does exactly what everybody else's baby does and pretend that it's somehow unique. Perhaps a few insecure artists afraid of disappearing into the void posted these pictures on cave walls to secure his place in the eternal cloud of data.