WHY DO WE DO THIS?

I was asked recently with regard to such rampant mutual bloggery, why do we do this? The problem is that when I try to answer that question, I’m never really quite sure.

I joined the world of what I like to call FizzBok despite having distrusted it for a long time only because there was a link somewhere to an article I wanted to read but you had to “sign up” in order to do so… I fully intended to delete my account from it almost immediately afterwards, but then my friend Alan “found” me and a whole situation about his life in the intervening years and his current situation with regards to his work and so forth unfolded. I guess, without that brief email, I might never have been recontacted and so never would have attended the “redundancy/reunion” party I later went to without it. Nor would I have had the inspiration for one of my pieces of writing so my opinion is now… more ambivalent, I suppose.

Ultimately, there is also a belief of a real dislike of social networking as a force in the modern world, not least in the way it tends to be so insidious and invasive and replace a lot of “real-world interface” as I’m guessing it might be called, or just “talking to people” and I really do have to respect that.

I tend to justify my presence in its clutches in a number of ways, all of which are probably just feeble excuses because I feel so feeble at having succumbed to its allure. For example, in my head, my FizzBok page exists as a small, hopeful beacon, which just sits there, blinking. If anyone has lost touch with me over the years and they (astoundingly) regret that fact, they can track me down by the simple fact that the account is there and they could contact me through it if they really wanted to.

Also, I like to think I manage the account on my own terms. I’m probably laughably wrong about this, but it means that it doesn’t happen to be one of the many things that keep me awake at nights.

So, because of those personal “terms and conditions” I set for myself, I don’t have any family on my list of acquaintances. This is despite my mother having been the one who wanted me to join in the first place because I still have this slight belief that what I’m doing with my friendships and what I’m doing with my family are two distinct worlds. Maybe you should be able to have “friends” and “family” accounts. Maybe you can and I just haven’t worked out how to do it yet. In any case, my family should have my phone numbers and my email address if they need to contact me anyway, why should they need to know anything else that I might get up to (or, more usually not)?

Generally I try to mostly avoid mindless pointless generalities, although I have been guilty of them. I just can’t see why people think that a lot of the general banality of life “I’m having a cup of tea” etc. is something anyone else in the world should really care about. No “high scores” from any games are broadcast by me, nor any “likes” clicked on or “coins” handed out. I can’t even seem to plan more than one day ahead, so the “invitations” tend to find me dithering until the very last moment possible before they mysteriously vanish.

I do post the links for the blog because, well it’s there as an option and I think it would be pointless writing them and then not letting anyone know they were there, but that, for now at least, seems to be the bulk of my interaction with it.

As to the blogs, why on Earth do I feel the need to do them (I hear you ask)?

I imagine that it’s more complicated. I discovered the one my former manager writes when I just happened upon a link to it as I was renewing acquaintances around about the time of the company dissolution I mentioned earlier. I thought I’d investigate the host site that he was using as it seemed to be one of the more accessible ones and I thought that if he was using it then it was probably okay and unlikely to empty the few pennies in my bank account into some distant pocket of a criminal mastermind in Africa. Having signed up, I genuinely thought I would be using it purely as a conduit to keep the enthusiasm going between meetings of that writers’ group that I keep mentioning, because at that time, it seemed to be becoming more of a possibility that it would actually exist and grow.

Then there is the writing itself. I’ve been writing plays and other bits (on and off) in a more determined way for about seven years now. It was always something I dabbled in, but a trip to the Edinburgh Fringe and a couple of positive conversations I had there made me want to write “properly” again. I genuinely still don’t know whether I’m actually any good at writing, and I never really do anything with the writing I do, and so it tends to end up sitting unloved in a bag or a box or a drawer.  I do however really enjoy the process of it, even if the pointlessness of the exercise of doing it for its own sake does sometimes completely defeat me and leave me unable to stitch even a mildly coherent sentence together for months on end.

I’m told that anything creative doesn’t have to have a purpose, the mere act of doing it makes it worthwhile in itself, and, of course, that’s absolutely right. Blogging does however manage to add a small nugget of purpose to the process (inside my head at any rate), and, even though barely a dozen people do end up actually reading the stuff, it’s giving me a new focus and getting me to the keyboard more regularly and making me think. I know I could probably bore for Britain and ultimately will most probably frighten that dozen away, but at the very least I’m enjoying the process and fun of the actual writing itself, and that’s a good thing, I guess.

Also, since I do work from home at the moment, I’ve been sitting in this small room now for nearly three years and not really engaging with the big wide world. Writing this blog has helped me to start to interact with that world again, because in my life, I rarely physically see many actual people and (as you might have read) my crippling self-doubts and lack of self-confidence tends to stop me from making those calls and meeting up once more with those folk I care about.

Time moves on and there comes a point in (non-) relationships when it’s really very difficult to just ring up out of the blue and pick up with someone’s obviously much-transformed life. Clangers can be dropped. Unknown incidents in the intervening years can make a “harmless” thought seem like something tactless and rude. People’s lives do change and I thought mine didn’t really. The scariness of the changes in people’s lives can physically frighten me because of the mental hoops it can make me jump through. It’s nobody else’s fault, it’s just the way I’m put together.

So, there you are then. Some of the reasons for my continued presence in this strange world I like to call “Blogfordshire”. I don’t know how long I will remain here, and I’m pretty sure it’s of massive disinterest to much of the world whether I actually do, but for the time being, you’re stuck with me and my witterings. I suppose if you’re interested enough to be reading this, then there must be some small purpose to it after all. Thank you for your time.

Until the next time, then…