Attack of the Blog

Does everybody really have something important to say? Honestly, I think the question really does bear mentioning. Technology has made publishing easier and easier at a rate I have been "fortunate" to directly see in my own lifetime...

• The world of my early youth was one when people could still only hope to publish themselves at great expense in a book, or in terse, vastly limited formats in the back page of the local paper...
• While I was in elementary school, personal computers gave people the tools to set down their words in boxy, dot matrix fashion, but still limited the reach of their written voice to the hands in which they could plant a stack of those pages...
• When I moved on to middle school, desktop publishing and vastly improved printers made our thoughts look much more attractive, albiet yet still to the same small audience...
• In high school, I participated in the earlier days of the internet, as those of us not dumbed down by AOL's early travesties in user interface limitations flocked to simple dialup BBS systems and posted our thoughts in communities, suddenly with small but growing audiences reading and replying...
• By the time I moved on to college, web publishing was beginning to become accessible to the more motivated and technically savvy, exponentially increasing the audience base for our textual musings...
• And now, today, one cannot watch half an hour of news without seeing the direct impact of these blogs, web logs maintained by, seemingly everyone, as well as their alter egos and pets.

So, now, entire universes of human thought are being set to text and formatted to the web each moment. Many movers and shakers have weblogs, as do those that wish to have their voice heard in their favored controversies. Topical hobbyists spew expertise and factoids. Even my high school students, in alarming popularity, set down what used to be kept in a diary or journal within the pages of a web log for their friends to read and reply.

We all seem to think we have something important to say, right? Or else... why are we doing this? If not for the belief that what we write today will be read and prompt thought or action from someone else, whether in a few minutes or a few days or a few years, why bother?

I have a theory about these "blogs." What proportion of them actually do get a reading? Certainly, the top thinkers and writers have followings... but how many more of us are just writing for an unknown audience that may be much smaller than we imagine?

How many of us are writing for an audience of ourselves alone?

And does that make it not worthwhile?