When Blogging Becomes a Nexus of Cyberspace and the Real World...

"You know, there are not that many Japanese people who come to the Philippines, and even among those few Japanese here, only the tiny minority is willing to explore different places and try new things.  I think, as member of this tiny minority, I have the duty and obligation to broadcast my experiences and newly gained knowledge via my blog."  This is perhaps the most genuinely and agreeably righteous comment the author has ever had the fortune to hear firsthand.  It is as if the comment suddenly opened up a whole new understanding of what blogging really means.

It has been 3 years and more than 370 posts on this running social and political commentary, and the author has very much stuck with the original motivation to express, unequivocally and without reservation, all opinions on all matters upon pages and pages of endless ranting.  For the author, now, as it was in 2010, this blog has been a marker of self-identity, a continuous search of who I am through journeys in different countries and professions.  The people, the places, and the events serve to embellish the identity, but they, at the end, should always remain support actors, and not the main role.

But until coming upon the above comment on the very purpose of blogging, the author has seemingly forgotten, or maybe intentionally suppressed the possibility that blogging, as an activity, can be more than just a self-centered forum of "I am this, I think that."  Instead, it could very much be an SNS in itself, providing informative entertainment for a group through knowledge-sharing, without the constant need for selfish gratification on being the constant receiving end of undivided reader attention.  It could be, analogously, a guidebook, not just an autobiography.

Yet, in ignoring the social aspect of blogging, the author still believes that he should be forgiven.  After all, we now live in a society where crowd-verified truth is never that faraway in the form of Google Search and Wikipedia...who should depend on one person's experience, perceivable as not revised, not verifiable, and without any trace of feedback, positive or negative.  No one who search for info should subject themselves voluntarily to writing that they know to contain personal bias, when they can head instead to professionally written guides, news, and info sheets.  

The author seemed to have forgotten one thing in this line of logic though...it is that, the more professional-looking and authoritative a source of information seems to be, the less "human" and "emotional" it also becomes.  A blogger, with pictures and anecdotes, try to draw the readers into their daily lives.  Of course, depending on writing skills and indeed how exciting their daily lives are, some bloggers are bound to be more successful than others.  But for all that bother to upkeep a blog for a long time, the amount of heart poured out to sustain the continued effort, there are no losers.

And as a reader really get into the writing of one blogger, the reader may even want to contact the blogger directly to trade similar experiences or argue back in disagreements.  Why?  Because the reader knows that behind the written words is a soul that is deeply passionate about the subject written about.  No reader of a Wikipedia entry will do the same thing.  They may grumble about the biased half-truths and even work up the courage and energy to do the editing themselves, but no one will ever bother to track down the anonymous original writer.  In an inhuman space, only accuracy is significant.  

And when the bloggers do find each other, enchanted by their respective stories and lives, something magical happens: the interaction goes offline, into real-life meetups to discuss common interests after realizing that they happen to reside in the general proximity.  The awkwardness is not there because the background research is naturally done with blog-reading, and the conversation simply flows as an extension to what were previously written.  The bloggers, with the meetings, reinforce each other's continued motivation to blog, to story-tell, and to broadcast to the world their bits of knowledge.

The author, when drinking with these "blogging buddies," felt a bit of envy.  The author has tried to go more diverse with the writing (even going so far to write one Japanese post) but cannot fundamentally escape the need for this blog to focus on self-expression rather than knowledge-sharing.  Well, in a way it could a reason to rethink the style, but at the same time, the realization of a very existence in which blogging functions as something different is a reinforcement that the author should continue his own style.  After all, it is diversity in unity that sustains the entire blogosphere, online and offline.