Why to bother with blogposts?

I'm often^[1] asked about why I write blogposts and I've recently thought about this a little more. Prompted, somewhat, by an article I read about the purpose of sharing on social media, and how we are all writing our own obituaries. Is it just a desire to be remembered, a desire to have left something behind?

As I said on a previous post when I started reblogging some of my past and then also when I've been more recently trying to trim my photo collection, it is pretty nice for me to remember the past sometimes. I don’t think that it is to be remembered myself. Or I'd like to think that it isn't. But, then why is it public? Why is it out there at all and not kept in my personal space? Why not a diary or journal? 

Maybe, just maybe, it is showing off in some way. I had never really thought about it like that but it must be that at some level. But I haven't really got anything that I'm showing off about - being able to construct sentences and putting pictures online is not really a skill in the modern world. I do like adding to discourse though, it may be more that.

Tatemae

Japanese social norms have the concept of honne and tatemae which is the idea of having a public, visible face and then your real thoughts and feelings are behind that. Social media does promote this quite a lot and, of course, many do try (and succeed) to do this with their profiles on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al. But probably not Google+.

There is a different way of looking at this, I think though. Unfortunately, it may be a little more nuanced and that is harder to represent in text, but it is still a way. In many ways, you could think of it as the backroom dealings before a public relations exercises - negotiations to reach a compromise before presenting to the public. At a personal level, this means considering the many competing thoughts swimming and swilling about in your head so that you can reach a coherent (or hopefully coherent) conclusion. It is that, which is the reason for my writing. 

Now, again, this is something that does not need to be public but there is worth in making it so in my opinion. First of all, there is a difference between dressing up and making yourself presentable. My attire at home on my own will be different to when I collect the milk from the doorstep to when I get the papers from the local shop to when I go to a dinner party^[2]. Going to the local shops still requires some form of respectability and I think it is that level which I am striving for in most of my blogposts. 

That it is forcing me, entirely of my own volition, into a structured form has been really positive for me. Some people have told me that I can be fond of a rant^[3] but that is not my aim at all - rants are unstructured and uncontrolled which is really not my desire at all. I am not necessarily writing about anything important (although I have to say my post on immigration is one that is relevant now and regularly since) but it is great practice for bedding down my opinions and giving me a reason. It has also made me approach things slightly differently - the constant thought of "is there material in this?". And you know what? There is material in everything and we'd all do well to recognise that. Now, watching a film means that I think about it as a whole, what it is trying to do and how it is trying to do that. I may have thought and felt that subconsciously before but now it is a thought process. I guess you can achieve that through conversation but what if your interests don't always intersect with those you know? It is the same for many of the things I have blogged - you might be interested but you probably are not. And if you are interested, I'll be ready to discuss as I'll have laid the foundations. I'll be ready for real life.

Does everything just end up being practice for real life?

<sup>1. Not true, they haven't. This is what you call poetic licence, I am not asked this as very few people read what I write, and it is a vanishingly small subset of people I actually see regularly. But as an introduction, it works by riffing on a standard phrase.↩
2. These are all universally understood things that we do, but I have to say that I don't do any of them. Again, some slight poetic licence.↩
3. Who better to judge my actions than other people - my self-awareness is not totally up to speed - but examples were thin on the ground. I wonder what the blog equivalent of subtweeting is? Or vaguebooking?↩</sup>