Is blogging a form of vanity?

 Photographer: Suki-Wilde

 My dear friend Unbearable-Lightness wrote in a recent post that a female fellow blogger decreed that all bloggers are vain, this is why they write blogs.  My oh my! I wonder why one would write a blog post about the vanity of blogging, it totally beats me.
I left a comment on UL's post. Then I began to reflect on this as I too have been told not only that I am a narcissist willing to put myself on display in any possible way but also that I write drivel. Does anyone read your garbage? did my admirer ask. There are forty-six people listed among my followers, so presumably yes, they read my garbage.
To a number of people writing a blog is apparently a big no no. A resistance to writing in general do you think? A resistance to the idea of writing something that can be - but actually is not - somewhat too personal?
Do I believe blogging is all down to vanity? Let's see. There are two things to consider here: 1.  the relationship of blogging to writing a journal and 2. writing online. I will speak entirely from a personal angle.

 Photographer: Martin Robinson

A blog (weblog) is a diary of sort, a journal shared with followers, usually family and friends but truly many more people, especially if it can be found by search engines.  There are thousands and thousands  of blogs on the internet, some to be accessed by invitation only. They can be as general or as specialised as one wants them to be.  They all share some commonalities  in that bloggers can publish their work online as and when they wish and can expand and/or delete posts at will. Blogging makes full use of hypertext - I use Zemanta occasionally to link up with other websites or I insert manually my chosen  links in the body of the post. Also blogging is not quite a formal piece of writing nor an entirely informal one. Posts are rarely overlong and even if they are somewhat academic in tone, as some indeed are, because of the subject matter, they do not follow the conventions of  referencing. That is left to scholarly journals alone - there are some which are published online rather than in print but it is very clear to readers that they are academic, peer-reviewed journals, usually accessible by subscription or through the library website of one's university, using a password.
The blog evolved out of the personal journal with the idea that someone else would read your writing, in other words a blog presupposes a readership, whereas a personal journal can be entirely your own and record your most intimate observations for your eye alone.
At various stages in my life I wrote personal journals. For me writing a journal always involved writing to someone, even though it might have been an imaginary interlocutor. In other words I have always needed a reader as I understood the process of writing as a dialogic one. I used to be a keen letter writer and later, email writer. I have often written missives which were in fact a way for me to clarify my own thoughts and should have been addressed to myself. A couple of close relationships have floundered because of my prolific and at time prolix letter writing - I used to find it inconceivable that others would have a block about writing and could not cope with my probing epistles. I have always loved novels which used the device of letter writing to present the point of view of different characters - I wrote a post some months ago about Les Liaisons Dangereuses which to me is one of the very best novels ever conceived and which remains the epistolary novel par excellence.
 I have always been fascinated by online writing. My first involvement as an online writer was  back in 2002 as an academic. I was invited to join the Stanford University Humanities Lab/Metamedia collaboratory and I did, using it as a platform to present my research and involve  readers  in conversation, through the use of comments. It was so new at the time! I later even published an online monograph, also through the Stanford collaboratory, I was excited that writing online allowed me to explore hypertext, insert photographs and QuickTime video-clips and my writing could be accessed by anyone anywhere in the world.
 When I began to model I became an assiduous reader of What We Saw Today and last year I  began to contribute to it. Then I felt the need to branch out on my own and write this blog.  Using my nude model persona for blogging matters to me because modelling is an important part of my life and one which for a number of reasons I need to keep separate from my other activities. Yet I am a model as well as a therapist as well as a dancer as well as a college lecturer as well as a mother and so and so forth.

I am currently training in a profession where writing journals is constantly encouraged. I am  told all the time to keep a journal for my creative dance experience, a journal for my clinical practice etc. Recording my thoughts and reactions seems to be central to my understanding of my own location as a therapist. These journals are not just for me.  They are not assessed by my tutors, but the practice of exchanging journals and reading aloud from each other's is well established in the classroom, as a learning tool. From the personal journal to the blog the step is a logical one. There are certain conventions which need to be observed when writing a blog but there are many similarities between a blog and a journal. A dance therapist whom I recently met maintains a blog about her own experiences as a therapist, suitably anonymizing her clients and always starting from her own subjectivity. She is a phenomenologist in her approach and her practice, including her writings, embraces this perspective.

Writing a blog is not at all to do with vanity. Of course, if you are vain your blog will reflect that, just as so many other things you do or say will. But a blog per se is not to do with vanity at all. For me it remains a personal journal modified  for online publication, but ultimately it is a journal and as such it encourages reflexivity.  And because it can be shared with others it encourages a dialogue and an exchange and thus one's  growth as a person and as a human being. Vive le blogging!

(All photos modelled by Alex B.)