I blog therefore I am

Many great people have kept diaries. These meticulously kept documents of course really come in handy when they write autobiographies on their equally great lives. Tony Blair recently expressed regret at not having kept a diary of his years at no. 10. Too bad indeed. I am sure we would all have loved to know exactly just what he was thinking on more than a few occasions! Some people even owe their fame exclusively to their diaries. Think Anne Frank, although I am sure she would have preferred owing her fame to X-Factor had she been given a choice.

Personally, I have never been very good at keeping a diary even though I did have one as a kid. It was one of those classic little books with a red leather(ish) cover and a shoddy lock even your five year old brother could have picked. To be fair, I don’t think mine ever tried but he could have… I wrote in it only very sporadically, maybe about two, three times a year and some years not at all. To me it always felt unnatural to write something that was to be read only by a future, distant version of myself. I never understood the point. I also assumed my brain would provide sufficient storage capacity for all those memories I could ever wish to preserve. Even though I know better now, I still don’t feel the urge to pick up a pen and write “dear diary”. I need an audience.

When I was younger I used to be a champion letter writer. My friends and I would write long letters, overflowing with all the usual teenage drama, and then give them to each other the next day at school. Keeping a blog is in some ways the logical extension of that. Let’s face it; blogs are mainly ego-documents craving for a captive audience. It is like keeping a diary but deliberately leaving the lock open in the hope that somebody will come along to read it and think you are the smartest/funniest/most interesting person to have ever walked the Earth. There is definitely something exhibitionist about putting your private thoughts and experiences out there for everybody, not just your curious little brother, to see.

I don't keep count of how many people visit this site, nor do I know exactly who you are. Chances are I know most people personally. Just occasionally, however, a complete stranger may stumble upon this site. I can’t deny I find a certain thrill in that thought. At the top of this page there is a little button marked "next blog". It is my own little magic door to a world of voyeurism. I often simply start clicking and surfing around, stumbling into the lives of unknown others like they might into mine. I get to read about their loves and their losses, their passions and their grievances and yet, they will never know that I have been there. We are all eavesdropping on each other’s conversations, raising our voices just loud enough so that they can hear us too. We don’t worry about a Big Brother watching us; we welcome him in for tea.