Blogging. Who do we think we are?

Blogging.  Who do we think we are?

Mark Carmody 

Online estimate’s chronicle the first reported ‘blog’ anywhere from 1993 to 1999.  A credible account of the history of blogging is just one of the problems associated with the phenomenon.

Internet publications of any kind retain a certain veneer. Not an attractively designed hardcover, but an indelible stain of questionable credibility.  Without the watchful sentinel of a publisher, fictional internet publications can readily convince even the most assiduous observer of their bona fides.  Howbeit, fictional publications may also, on occasions, deceive traditional publishers. Thereafter the additional literary watchdogs, the traditional literary public, will step in to provide additional critical scrutiny, which intensifies proportionally to the publication’s commercial success.  Gavin McKenzie’s controversial ‘novel’ 1421 is evidence that works of fiction can only ever temporarily wear historical guises on the commercial publication stage.

Credibility aside there is possibly a more disturbing question to be asked of ‘bloggers’.  The word ‘autobiography’ appeared first in literary circles around the time of the Enlightenment movement in the 18^th century.  Until that time society was comfortable with the biographical depiction of other people’s lives but questioned the motives behind auto-biographers.  At that time, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an internationally renowned philosopher, novelist, composer, educationalist and political provocateur yet, when his autobiographical masterpiece Confessions first appeared, the public considered that it indeed took some self-absorption by Rousseau to imagine that the humdrum details of his life would be of interest to anybody but himself.  At the time the Monthly Review, said that Rousseau was ‘a man whose vanity and presumption so imposed on his understanding, as to lead him to imagine that mankind would lend a ready ear to the most trifling, to the most dull, to the most impertinent, to the most disgusting relations, because they concerned Rousseau’[1]. 

Rousseau’s life is nowadays unquestionably an important part of history, philosophy and his political theories still provided fodder for fruitful contemporaneous discourse.  ‘Confessions’ has stood the test of time.  My question is this.  Of the millions of autobiographical blogs reverberating in cyberspace today, how can we recognise or why should we bother, to seek out those of substance?  Can any blogs ever really be motivated by reasons other than some ordinary authors’ self-absorption?

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[1] ‘Rousseau’s Dog’ by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, Faber and Faber, 2006,
London