How I Benefit from Blogging
My friend Anita asked me the other day why I choose to have a public blog rather than simply keeping a private journal. I thought about it for a while, and I arrived at an explanation of why I like my blog and why I choose to keep it public.
- An audience, however small, obliges me to write regularly. Perhaps a very self-motivated person can just keep it private, but that doesn’t work for me. Imagine you’re at home alone and you have a nice big Milka bar sitting there next to you, and you know you should work out and eat vegetables, but instead you eat the candy bar and look at youtube all night. You feel kind of lame. That’s how private blogs are for me. I feel bad for being lazy, but not bad enough to make me write. Knowing that I have even a few friends and family that expect something is the extra little boost of obligation to counter my natural laziness. Hey, at least I know myself.
- A public blog is a nice way to keep the people I care about up to date. I’ve been getting some more traffic in the few weeks since the Tiny thing, but I’m actually more interested in communicating to the people I already know. Burak and Kelly and a few friends around the lab check on it occasionally, Jenn subscribes, my parents read it, etc. My group also looks at it, including Henry and John, so it’s a nice way for them to know that I am doing things and when something is interesting they ask me about it. A few of my group members also keep blogs, and we can easily reference one others’ work and ideas as they come.
- It is a dynamic portfolio. If/when I am someday looking for work I will point to the blog as a partial explanation of what I’ve been doing here. I feel that it is a nice way to mark certain ideas as my own. The contract stuff I’m thinking about seems new because I haven’t found any other people thinking about it the same way. If I get enough material up on my blog it will serve as a record that I was pushing these ideas early on, and if others find my work interesting they are more easily able to find it, and there is greater chance of collaboration and idea exchange.
- The public blog serves as an excellent self-reflection exercise. I enjoy looking back on how my thoughts have shifted over the past eight months since I started writing. I’m also looking forward to using it as a tool for composing my thesis. I plan to write a good chunk of the thesis as blog entries. My blog is pretty safe; for the most part I can write what I like, and in the process I learn my voice and style. I’d like to approach my thesis with the same exploratory, meditative mentality, so the blog seems like a natural tool. Perhaps someday I’ll develop books, stories, or articles in the same way.