J500 Media and the Environment

My partner asked me a question yesterday that summed up a lot of my trepidation about blogging. Philosophically, she could have been asking me the old tree falling in the forest question. “If you blog and no one reads it,” she said, “have you said anything?”

Hmmmm. Well, the answer depends on the reason you write.

I’ve pursued English in my post-secondary education for eight years. It’s taken about that long to figure out that writing for me alone isn’t enough. It may be cathartic to puzzle out the most compelling way to write, but it isn’t satisfying. What I really crave is a conversation – inspiring a conversation among other people sometimes, or other times a discussion between writer and reader. That’s what drew me to creative non-fiction and essay writing as a grad student. You can apply your personal lens to experiences (both common and uncommon to the rest of the populace), and maybe they get something out of that, too.

Now that I’ve been properly introduced to blogs (howd’y’do), I see them as a mechanism to bring good writing and that conversation together. Blogs do what I would argue the printed form cannot: they are an invitation. They are, look what happened! Isn’t this amazing? Let’s talk about this and find the other people who are passionate about it, too! There’s an intimacy in their personalities and immediacy in their instant communication.

But communication is not just message sent. It’s also message received. People have to find that blog or you have to find them, and that brings us back to blogging in the forest, so to speak. If you write just for yourself, there isn’t much potential for someone else to hear you. That’s just narcissism and diary fodder and frankly, the blogosphere has enough navel gazing as it is. If you want to bring about change, conversation, make someone think – all those things and more will be reflected in the blogging choices you make. That means cultivating an audience through your personal writing style, the information you present, your credibility, your candor.

So, I’d like to turn the question around. I don’t think the issue is whether you’ve been heard; the question to ask yourself is, how will you make sure that you are heard? How will they make a connection to what you write, what you say, what you present to them, so they can continue the conversation?

I don’t know about you, but after this semesterly experiment is over, I will still be talking about the issues we’ve discussed. And writing. And listening. And hoping (ever idealistic) that it makes a difference. –Jen Humphrey