Why blog?

The trouble with being early to the dance is that you tend to get bored much too soon. When the bulk of the guests arrive to the party you’ve already checked out every corner of the venue, made friends with the DJ by helping him set up, and even managed to have some fun while talking to the bar staff. Some might even confuse you for one of the bus boys, that’s how comfortable you are with the decor.

Well the party started way early for me. I tried out blogging almost 8 years ago now (maybe even before that since I remember it going something like Greymatter > MoveableType > WordPress installations) and over time I became less and less interested in sharing my thoughts widely, falling back to the comfortable position of lurker of other people’s content and only occasional poster in my own web space.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to claim that I was the proto-blogger at some point or anything like that. But undeniably there were not many people in my social circle that were interested in keeping a public litany of feelings, and I soon found it silly to continue the effort.

You could argue that I got bored with it, or that I simply became too worried with the technology and stopped looking at the immediate purpose of the tools being put at my disposal. That immediate purpose is to share, and I had stopped sharing (not that anybody cared, mind you!) Using these tools for work might have something to do with the disillusion as well, it’s as if that lovely Montblanc pen stops feeling special once you start using it take down pizza orders at your night-shift job. You get the idea.

Well, I am back to blogging. Not for anybody, really, but for myself. I can’t even claim that my latest encounter with Larry Lessig’s wonderful thought process convinced me. He had me at “hello!” a few years back, I just haven’t been willing to put in the effort of adding something of value to the hordes of people out there consuming each others exhaust. I was breathing my own, in the form of draft postings that never got quite finished.

In deciding to give this another go, the question in my mind was simple: “why blog?”

To illustrate my answer that most simple of questions I’ll introduce you to the top three items in my “read and formulate and opinion” list:

I want blogging to force me to think. I want it to make me generate coherent sentences and position myself along some defined line, rather than perpetually receiving information without making much of a decision on what it really means.

The very thought of reaching a point of deeper understanding of these topics makes me want to write. That and the combination of a desire to produce a bit more content than I do today, simply by stealing away from the number of hours I dedicate to simply follow others.

That is the reason why I’m going to write here, and here and here again. Not that anybody cares.

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