Cory recently wrote about blogging. The greatest part of the whole thing is his comparison of blogging to high school. Unfortunately, I think he's right.
When I think about high school, I get sick to my stomach. I hated it. I was the skinny kid with the big thick glasses, the new kid (I moved just before starting 9th grade), the smart kid the teachers liked and the shop kids hated because their ignorant parents told them the man was smart and the man was the reason they lived in a trailer.
High school was all about cliques. The aformentioned shop kids were a clique, just like the honor roll students and the jocks.
In high school, you don't know who you are. You think you know, but you don't know. Hell, in high school, you're just beginning to figure out what the hell you use your penis for and why girls don't have one. If you can't figure out your hardware, how the hell are you going to understand the software?
In high school, the search for one's identity leaves you confused, angry, and at the same time occupies all of your time, meaning you're confused and angry all the time. Why don't people like you? How come the cute girl dates the stupid kids? Why does your mom always make you do the right thing when the other kids don't have to? What the hell's the point of life? All of this is swirling around and you're trying to cope, trying to grow up, trying to become a real person who contributes to the world.
For me, I grew up at college. I found myself there. For many of my high school classmates, they didn't get to look for themselves anywhere beyond high school. In fact, if you go back to my high school for a sporting event or for band practice, you'll find many of the same kids trying to crawl back into their size 6 air jordans in order to relive those college years where they could bully other people around, eat dinner their mother cooked, and watch tv or play outside after they finished their homework. It was a simpler life after all.
What does all of this have to do with blogs? Well on the web, no one knows who you are until you tell them. With a blog, they figure it out by what you write. You can be anyone, reveal whatever you wish, find whoever you'd like within yourself. All of a sudden you're in high school again, fighting with the popular kids, saying mean things to each other, and trying to figure out who the hell you are and what you contribute to the world besides carbon dioxide.
However, for those of us who are comfortable with who we've become, at least at a base level, the blog becomes more. We become journalists with our own little newspaper to publish our findings, or programmers sharing our knowledge.
A perfect example of this is Dawn. She's comfortable with herself in real life, got her blog, and recently had some issues with other bloggers. She realized something wasn't right, and her posts lately have reflected that. She sounds like an intelligent, sexy, smart woman; she's a mother who loves her daughter, her husband, and her whole family. That's why people read her, and why the've read her all along: they can relate to what she has to say because they're people who fall into the same categories who are looking for themselves, looking to grow as people.
The web's an interesting place, and we still don't understand how it will affect us when all is said and done, but we do know that its changing us, revealing our flaws, and showing our strengths. I'm glad to be a part of it.