During my work-avoidance today (which usually involves surfing web sites that I have no interest in whatsoever because I’ve already read all of those that I actually pay attention to), I saw the usual pile of meaningless weblogs. Some girl telling her life story, laced with equal parts egotism and pathological insecurity… A high school kid lamenting about his recent breakup, as if he’s writing to his imaginary friend instead of the dead silence of an internet where no one cares…
Some looked really nice but didn’t have shit for content, while others both looked and read like hell. I realize this blog is just as much a piece of trash as all the rest (if not more). Yes, this blog and this site are just mental spillings… but you won’t catch me crying about a rotten upbringing or any “why doesn’t she like me” bullshit. And yes, the news bytes posted here are meaningless crap (much like the commentary) but it kills time when I have time to kill. So, it serves it’s purpose… but that’s not my point. This is: 98% of the blogs I’ve seen are no more than personal journals — people putting their private thoughts up for an entire world of strangers to see. This stuff would usually be reserved for that beat-up little notebook hidden in the sock drawer and filled with mental spillings that, if read by any person other than the author, would mean the instantaneous end of the world. Death by embarrassment. Why then are so many people not just willing, but actually eager and anxious to tell a universe of strangers about their inner-most thoughts?

I’ve read articles that hypothesize about a social breakdown of interpersonal communication (which I think is very real), made worse by things like chat rooms, email and cell phones (which I’m not so sure are to blame). I can’t help but wonder if this explosion of weblogs is a manifestation of that breakdown. People unable to really communicate face to face, so instead they do so by broadcasting their thought patterns to anyone with a computer and time to kill. Why has this practice of journal writing moved from being the most private thing one can do (besides jerking off in the closet to the Victoria’s Secret catalog), to becoming ultra-public and fit for strangers around the world to read? Have people become that desperate for someone to hear them?

This weblog, thankfully, has no readers — zero — so I suppose I could cry about not getting what I wanted for christmas, or whine about living with 40 cats as my only friends… But I won’t ’cause (1)I don’t have cats, (2)I got what I wanted for christmas, and (3)I think people are for talking to… not keyboards.