Monday, January 17, 2005

A late one...

I think I was supposed to have gone to bed a while ago. But I didn't, so here I am.

Blogging. It's a strsnge thing. I've been here over a year now, posting every day, apart from a few times when I've been away from computers, and a couple of times when I cheated and lied about the day (sshhhh!). A year isn't a very long time, but it's strange how a blog can become so much an integral part of your life.

I think it's good to have that little bit of discipline that forces me to be mildly creative every day. Or sometimes not creative at all. Some questions that I can't answer:

Would I do this if nobody read it?
Is it all some odd bizarre attention seeking stunt?
Is the me that writes here the real me?
Is there a real me?
Should I try and avoid these late night slightly drunk posts?

If those questions can be answered, I'm not the one to do it.

I heard a good joke this afternoon. Sadly it's not really repeatable.

Am I still here? Yep. Still typing.

2 comments:

Sarum said...

I've asked the "real me" questions several times of myself in the past. Although I've not been blogging as long as you, I've had an online presence of sorts, through various online games, forums, chat rooms etc, for around 6 years. The best I've come up with by way of an answer is, your online persona is a real you rather then the real you. People are incredibly complex things, any attempt to box them, to take a still image and say "this is who they are" is doomed to failure. Even a single person has many faces, a shifting collection of public expressions of their true selves.

We all know we behave slightly differently with different groups of friends. I know I'm different at work to how I am at home, different with my friends from uni, and different again with those at the gaming centre. They're all me, unquestionably so, but they're all different me's. My collection of online me's are the same.

I used to think "Sarum", my primary online self, was "more me" than my offline self. That without the restrictions of reality (and safe in the knowledge that nobody really knew who I was) I was able to be more myself than I could offline. Now I think he's just another aspect of myself, no more or less close to the truth, no more or less important to defining who I really am.

We rarely set anyone see the entirety of our "true" self. Instead we subconsciously select aspects of it to allow people to see, and hide the other bits away. Maybe we let them in a little further later on, once we trust them more, maybe we don't.

I could do another essay on why I think people blog, and the value of it.. but this is supposed to be a comments section, so I better at least attempt to keep things comment length.

Lint said...

I'd love one. But I'll have to take a raincheck on it for now. It's a little late after all... And I did just tell someone I was about to go to bed, and so I wouldn't want to make myself into a liar :-)