Why We Read Blogs

Why are you here?

I wish it were because of my fantastic Cheerios header or web design, but I know that’s not it. Maybe it’s because you like the title of the blog, or the title of this post. Perhaps my address is one among many in your Google Reader or your favorites folder (if so, thank you, thank you!) because you like what I have to say. Maybe it’s even on your blogroll (even more exciting!). Or maybe you found me as a commenter somewhere else, and just now stumbled upon An Attitude Adjustment. Any which way, I’m so glad you’ve come.

The question of why you’re here, and why I’m so often “there,” at other blogs, was on my mind this weekend, as I went on a mini-vacation with my husband. With the help of my in-laws, we were able to drop off the kids and stay at my sister-in-law’s apartment in Manhattan, where she is serving her medical residency. Husband and I were able to have long-winded conversations, eat dinner uninterrupted, savor our coffee, and take notice of our surroundings. And I was thinking a lot about blogs–writing them and reading them in lieu of fiction, or news. Why have I become so fascinated with them? What is the draw?

I think the reason has to do with something Ricky Gervais, creator of The Office and Extras, said in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air last week. He remarked that when he’s creating a new show, he thinks audiences are more interested in ordinary people struggling than ones who are “unfeasibly handsome [and] brilliant” doing brilliant things. As in The Office, perhaps what we really want to see is “a few people thrown together, an arbitrary existence, walking the same carpet everyday.” Stories are everywhere. As Mr. Gervais noted, ”Walk down the street for a half-hour, I’ll give you a half-hour of drama.”

Getting out of my small suburban town and into the big city, I saw this drama everywhere: foreign tourists with guidebooks on the subway; a man with a guitar reading a book on America’s urban future; the man who looked like he endured electrocution to sit at a Union Square coffee shop, typing furiously; the woman crying on a bench in Central Park.

When I started this blog, my goals were to exercise my writing muscle, to record thoughts and moments as I navigate the sticky terrain of motherhood, and mostly, to have something purely my own.  But I didn’t realize how big a deal blogging had become in our culture, especially among women, and especially among moms. So many of us are trying to find our way in this ordinary and extraordinary venture, and it’s refreshing to see that we’re not alone.

The reason you’re here, and the reason I’m here, I think, has to do with what Mr. Gervais said–we’re trying to get a closer look at all those stories that usually just pass us by. In a city, we only get a glimpse; on a blog, we get a lot, if not most, of the story. Perhaps people’s hearts seem a little more within our reach.

Blogs have democratized journalism. In blog-world, anyone with “an arbitrary existence” can be a writer, a storyteller. Any of us can have an audience of our own. And there’s an intimacy, an immediacy, to our reactions, however virtual they may be.

Just like writers, there are good bloggers, bad bloggers, boring bloggers, thoughtful bloggers. And then there are the bloggers we return to again and again, people who walk the same proverbial carpet as we do, people who dish up the struggles we feel every day, the stories we’ve always been wondering about.

Why do you read blogs? If you are a blogger, what makes you keep writing your own?


Image: Times Square–New York City by meironke via Flickr using a Creative Commons license.

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Tagged as: writing