Blogiversary post

It's three years today since I first found Blogger and worked out what to do with it.

Perversely, I'm going to celebrate -- perhaps 'mark' would be a more accurate word -- this anniversary by mentioning what is for me the single biggest downside of blogging.

I'm what I think of as a sociable blogger, that is, one who reads and comments at lots of other people's blogs - there are at least 20 that I read regularly, and by regularly I mean often daily. A few of these blogs are written and run by small or large teams of bloggers and have large readerships and long, active comments threads. I spend a great deal more time reading other people's blogs than I do writing my own (and this in itself is, I think, a mistake).

Still, thanks to blogging I'm far better and more widely informed about current affairs and the debates around them than I have ever been before. Blogging has given me an astonishing education about what other people and their lives are like. Most of us gravitate to people like ourselves, reinforcing our belief that our own standards and values are the norm from which everything else is a deviation.

Blogging is a truly wonderful corrective to this. I get great satisfaction, pleasure and relief, for example, from seeing the state of other people's kitchen floors. I thought it was just me.

I have had far more contact with lots of different men, with mothers of young kids, with people a generation older and people a generation younger than me than I ever get in real life. From what I've seen, I have very, very high hopes of the people who are currently in their 20s. (Though I do worry in a maternal sort of way about how much they seem to drink. I put away a fair amount in my own 20s, often more out of absent-mindedness than anything else, and it was usually not a very good idea at all.)

But here's the downside. The nature of moral and ideological conviction being what it is, when you see someone expressing opinions you find repugnant then the natural impulse is to take them on. And thus it is that the blogger, or at least the social blogger, finds herself wasting hours and hours of her precious time in pointless engagement with people she would in real life cross the street, possibly the suburb and in some cases the entire country, to avoid.

Examples: those who appear to the blogger be mad or drunk or on drugs. Those who take delight in deceptive trolling, baiting and sock-puppeteering. Those who are unable to communicate without being aggressive, insulting and cruel. Those she finds ignorant, or vicious, or stupid. Those who are incapable of either producing or comprehending rational argument. Those who don't know the difference between opinion and analysis, or that between belief and fact. Those she would never engage with in real life in a million years, and whose opinions are, in her own view, worth less than a bucket of warm spit, which could at least be put on the garden.

For reasons I don't understand, I waste a lot of time reading the badly written effusions of these people. (Fellow bloggers, especially those who have ever smoked, gambled, drunk to excess, done drugs or had food issues, will know that time spent online is highly conducive to addictive behaviours and quickly leads to sitting up half the night like that little man in the XKCD cartoon.)

Like that little man, I waste a lot of time and emotional energy either in engaging with the awful stuff they write, in making the effort not to engage with it, or in dealing with the emotional effects of the hatred expressed by, in particular, a certain kind of man with a vicious, all-consuming and monomaniacal grudge against a certain kind of woman. Of which I'm.

Being hated does you harm. Especially when it comes from someone you've never even met.

One of the other really alarming effects this is having is that I can feel it gradually dumbing me down. One sure way to blunt the edge of your intellect is to use it hacking away at drongoes.

And I could be spending that time

-- listening to music
-- working
-- doing non-work reading
-- playing with the cats
-- gardening
-- calling/visiting/writing to beloveds
-- doing house and yard maintenance
-- sitting at the piano wrestling that Satie to the deck, damn it
-- sewing some cool cotton bumming-around retro-hippie dresses for summer
-- taking photographs
-- writing my novel
-- walking along the beach watching dogs and kids
-- singing

So that's my third blogiversary resolution. Put a time limit on blog activity, as though you were your own parent dealing with your own recalcitrant adolescent offspring. Refine the parameters. Engage only with the bloggers and commenters you like and admire. (I didn't say 'agree with', I said 'admire'.) Save your blogwriting energy for your own posts, not for enraged answers to nasty, stupid, aggressive, sexist, racist, masculine-supremacist and/or barking swine.

Blogging -- and by 'blogging' I mean reading and commenting as well as writing -- is a wonderful thing, and its powers should be used only for good. Today, here at Still Life With Cat, I resolve to lift my standards.