On blogging and public opinions

Blogging has become one of my favorite activities this year, after I made the commitment to express ideas just as regularly as taking them in (mostly via books). Blogging isn’t quite like my experience with journaling, which is private, self-oriented rather than audience-oriented. I have noticed that my voice in journaling and blogging does not necessarily change, but the activities themselves differ in many definitive ways. For one, I encounter a lot more resistance in putting words down to paper the screen when I know a blog post will be read by others and not just myself. I can afford to be as self-absorbed as I wish in the privacy of my journaling pages, but when there is an audience, I feel a burdensome accountability in projecting my thoughts out there and having people interweave these with their own experiences and worldviews. It’s not exactly a fear of judgment, though of course there is always an element of that. Rather, I am bothered by the sense of blatant egotism that comes with the public expression of opinions. Deep down it may have to do with my fundamental belief that we are all just idiots wandering around, not knowing rights from wrongs in most cases, but also willing to experiment and learn. This ignorance which I presume of myself fuels a perpetual hesitancy in being sure of anything and everything. In my teenage years I was a lot more adamant about the opinions I put out there, but now I tend to assume a position of questioning and refrain from stating or opinionizing in any matters that are not directly from my experiential pool.

I am also weary of the supposed permanence of publicly expressed thoughts. In my mind, I don’t want to hold anyone, myself included, accountable for a statement they offhandedly (or even intentionally) make in perpetuity. Again we are just ignorant messes figuring out life as we go. In today’s world, however, we too easily judge and assume the whole of someone from a brief moment of interaction, an isolated comment, or a sole action witnessed, recorded, and thrown out there in the chaos of the Internet. As media and technology nourish the tendency to turn these minor occasions into the permanent existence or worthiness of someone, we have somehow created a weapon against both humanity and humility. People are often viewed as one-dimensional avatars, and their public existence (at least the digital one) is substantiated by mere keywords that spell out political ideologies, sexual orientation, highly specific black-and-white stances on large complex issues, and unshakable identification with a cultural niche or community. There is nothing wrong with finding and naming identities for oneself, but when it triggers an inflated ego, a misguided sense of self-righteousness, and perpetual conflicts with others while lacking a nuanced understanding of them, the phenomenon is far from harmless.

These are some reasons why I generally dread expressing my ideas publicly in blogs more than in my private journal. I have about 10 drafts in my backlog and yet I keep starting new ones without finishing the existing drafts. I also keep a long list of all the ideas I have out of the blue so later I could look back and write about any of them when inspiration hits. What is odd is that I already know what I want to say on each of these topics, yet I find it incredibly difficult to commit my thoughts to something as public as a blog. I already understand that my opinions may change and morph over time because I know very little anyway, but the world out there is less likely to concur with this, and so here I am discussing my occasional unease with blogging (and making a blog post out of it).