Blogging: A Moral Question

A friend of mine asked me today whether I thought "the sudden and dramatic explosion" of blogs was "a good thing." His question tapped into a issue I've spent a lot of time thinking about over the past few days. What is the value of keeping a blog?

We all know that blogs come in all shapes and sizes. Some make us more aware of the world around us. Others are simply fun. And some are stream-of-consciousness journals, unedited accounts of those willing to bare their souls for the world to see. All of us are asserting ourselves in a vast, world-wide medium, competing for our moment on the LCD screen. What's one more drop in a pond that vast?

In the end, I guess I just like stories. I like to read them, to study them, to tell them, and to write them. Stories mean something. They gives us a vocabulary for understanding our own lives. Sometimes, just reading a story can liberate us, set us free to think about our selves and our experiences in ways we never thought possible. They help us to step outside ourselves, to see our actions in the stories' characters, helping us to understand who and what we are.

Stories, too, shape the narratives of the lives we lead. What teenage girl hasn't pined away for a great unrequited love just because that's what teenaged girls do in stories? Better yet, what child hasn't whispered "I think I can" to herself the first time she rides a bicycle? And what Dickens reader has read the final scene of A Tale of Two Cities without the instant to go and do some "far better thing" of his own?

Best of all, a story has its own, external existence. Romeo and Juliet is timeless because of what it shares with no many stories of tragic love, both real and fictional. Dante's Commedy remains relevant because a struggle with faith is a common human experience. Hundreds of stories get retold on paper and on the stage of the world around us every day. We share the narratives that run through our lives with billions of other people in human history. No two people share the same narrative threads, but those threads create a vast and intricate web connecting all of human history. That's why reading really can make us more human. We all have our own stories. But we are never truly alone because there is never a new story.

So ...and Enide is my attempt to tell my own story--a story I share with hundreds of other people, but told in a way that's uniquely my own. My blog is my quest to find others like me who share tales of prince-like lovers or of conquering their own personal monsters. It's my quest to shape my own engaged, and later, married life into the patterns of Enide, Jo March, or even my parents--patterns that work. And it's my quest to share my story with people still writing their own stories in the hope it will help them understand their own.

No, I don't think that "the sudden and dramatic explosion" of blogs is "a good thing." Or at least not necessarily. In fact, my blog--my story--may not mean what I would like it to mean to anyone else but me. Still, I do believe there is a value in people telling their stories in a medium free from the struggle to be profitable or trendy. And whether they are interesting or not, stories almost always have a value. I hope you, as a reader, continue to find some value in mine.