Saturday, October 4
I was thinking about the nature of blogging this morning and remembering, with a little embarrassment, my initial, rather lofty, intentions on first beginning this blog. How I had hoped to elevate this blog from becoming a platform of personal perceptions and peeves to something with a little more substance and ‘charm’! Oh how naive my young blogger’s mind. Well, as those of you who are bored and kind enough to read this regularly well know, I have been sucked in by the ‘blog bog’. What I find most fascinating about this is that the more I write about inconsequential nothing’s (aka ‘the comings and goings of my life’) the larger my readership becomes.
Quite simply this ‘peeping-tom’ aspect of our society that is manifesting itself rapidly alongside an exploding internet culture, fascinates me. Along with the enormous popularity of reality-tv, internet sites such as MySpace and Facebook dominate social interaction. I recently read an article written by a ‘mommy-blogger’ who decided to quit the daily blog she wrote about her 4 year old daughter because she was worried that her daughter might one day resent her mother for violating her privacy by writing about her early life in such detail. My first thought on reading this was that this mother had obviously never visited MySpace. Billions of profiles open for the inquisitive and curious. Photograph after photograph accompanied by personal details ad nauseum. Young aspiring stars no longer have to face the closed doors of Hollywood and 'wannabe' models no longer have to prostrate themselves to slimy agents. MySpace allows everybody one ‘page’ of Fame and no one wants to be left out (or leaves anything out for that matter). Every girl is ‘beautiful’, every boy has a ‘band’ and we watch and listen and ogle and flirt. We spy, we pry, we chat, we cam all without ever leaving the comfort of our own home or having the safety of our real identity exposed.
Facebook is a little more sedate but nevertheless still allows one access into other people’s lives without ever having to interact with them. Voyeurism. Sweet, delicious voyeurism. Tell someone that they are voyeuristic and they will deny it vehemently because spying is taboo. But we rush home from work to watch Big Brother, to check our MySpace page, to chat to someone on line that we’ve never met, because we’re frightened and lazy and its so much easier to live vicariously.
But now my husband (that I met through MySpace) has just woken and I have to make lunch….
Till the next one
-A-