A cozy way to avoid face-to-face argumentation and uncalculated verbalization.

All of a sudden it feels as if not having a blog is like not having a cell phone or an arm. I have arms, but I don’t blog and I don’t have a cell phone anymore.

Not because I am morally against portable phones, but because mine was stolen and I decided I had already given T-Mobile way too much money. Plus, cell phones, just like any other addictive personal technology, trigger neurotic, obsessive behavior.

And there are a few other things on my list of “things to be obsessed about” before portable phones come up. But my moral assessment came after my phone got stolen, perhaps as an attempt for self-justification, a way of disdaining, really.

“But you have to blog!” a friend tells me. “Everyone blogs.” So before blogging, I decided I should investigate the implications of blogging and why “everyone” does it, whether as a blogger or as a bloggee.

So I Googled “blogs” and got familiar with the fad. A few days later, I realized that most blogs seem to be personal diaries, an otherwise utterly intimate thing, made public — an exercise in narcissism.

And blogs seemed to be text versions of interpersonal discussions that we, as overtly anti-confrontational people, refuse to have in real life — exposed to potential public gaze.

So with all of our uncontrollable pragmatism, we found a way of projecting our need for dialogue and debate without actually having to really do it (in front of people). In a sense, blogs represent our defense mechanisms against social interaction and physical, live communication. A cozy way to avoid face-to-face argumentation and uncalculated verbalization.

There are, evidently, undeniable positive effects that come with blogs: personal expression, exchange of ideas, easier dissemination of political engagement, circumventing of mainstream media monopoly, etc. But blogs seem to inevitably represent a symptom of a society so fearful of human interaction it constantly appropriates tools that enable argument minus physical presence — from the comfort of computer desks. A society so miserably lonely it needs to create the illusion of interaction only to indulge itself in its individualism even more.

Blogs differ in nature, from fashion tips to socio-political think tanks, and, logically, bloggers differ in intention as well. Some may be journalist wannabes, some may want to change the world, some just want to be heard, others may just be bored, and the list of motives goes on.

But behind the need to make the kind of blog that tracks one person’s quotidian accomplishments, making the private public, there seems to lay a worrisome tendency towards making the intimate banal. We — pathologically incapable of talking about personal things with our own parents and siblings — don’t think twice before publishing it for the whole world to read.

Perhaps we know that in the overwhelming ocean of information, everyone will have forgotten about us by tomorrow. So we keep on posting, so that someone, somewhere, validates our otherwise pointless existences.

The problem of language also surfaces when we think about most blogs as crystallizers of bad grammar, poor style and weak writing skills. The informality of blogs, while an encouraging alternative to big media monopoly, emphasizes a linguistic “anything goes” that — while it may get certain points across — stagnates writing as literature.

The epitome of informal pragmatism, blogs succeed in expressing ideas, but at any price, via any kind of text. There is no commitment to quality here, only quantity. And who is going to even remember those ancient November 2005 posts hidden somewhere in the archives folder?

Most blogs, while exerting important personal, artistic and social functions, atrophy sophisticated writing and slap extremely short expiration dates to sloppily-worded ideas.

Another bothersome aspect of blogging is the fact that it reiterates our allergy for social confrontation and our resistance to real critical discussions. When two people talk about an issue in person, even if no one changes their mind, two voices speak and two voices are heard.

When one blogs, one’s ears are plugged out of the world, it is one’s monologue, no two-way channels. The fact that little comments can be posted at the end of main blog posts visually reinforces the fact that those comments are hierarchically inferior to the main blogger voice that had previously spoken.

Whether the trend has spread around the world, blogs are an essentially American phenomenon, just like the Internet invasion. The idea that the whole world is connected is rather American-centric and delusional.

What Europeans and South Americans discuss over coffee and cigarette breaks, we concoct from the sterile silence of ergonomic leather chairs and fluorescent office lighting.

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