Blogging – redefining friendship in the 2.0 age

How is blogging like keeping a pen-pal? Is it at all? Let's see: you can keep in touch, cross continents. There is often dialogues and confessions. Conversations are as likely to be continued via email, person to person, once contacts and trust has been established. It is arguably more convenient, also. One can choose to leave comments or not. One can choose not even to visit a blog or not anymore. That arguably leaves less evidence than of a hand-written relationship; of papers left in drawers, aged epistles which are proof of the owner’s lack of depth or patience. I have a secret. When I was in primary school, there was an initiative to begin a pen-pal program with kids in America. Sexes were split between hats and our future correspondent was drawn as a lottery-- about as random a start to a relationship as any. Thus, many, I’m certain, were doomed from the start. Mine sure was. I do not remember much about my pen-pal, except that she lived in Ohio, and had the roundest, happiest writing I have ever seen and for years after associated with the personality of Americans as a whole. Did I respect her though? No. It was the writing; I have long had mistrust for people with nice penmanship (as those with appalling penmanship, like me, tend to do). So every time I got a letter on that pastel pink paper, peppered with love-hearts instead of dots on the ‘i’s, it made my young blood boil. Would it now? No. But now I have other tastes to discriminate with. If I am perusing new blogs and am in less than a benevolent mood, I could (and have) spent a good few minutes coveting their design, their owner’s ability to photoshop, their spacial abilities to be able to fit all their images and accoutrement's into the coding matrix. I can on mine, don't get me wrong, but that’s only because I paid someone to set it up to my liking in the first place. I sometimes feel like a fraud. I feel like I’m one of those domineering (male) bosses in those old movies, dictating speeches and letters to a secretary who is madly typing nearby, being the facilitator of information. What exactly have I done on my blog that is completely unique? Which brings us to ‘voice’. Of course, our ‘voice’ is our own. No-one’s blog can be exactly like another for that reason. But I adulterate my voice at times, so how can my ‘friendships’ that are based upon the words which I write be fully legitimate? It’s like I’m friendly with ghosts, and they’re friendly with a simulacrum of me. I can see why such conferences as Blogher, then, are so vitally important. They give bloggers a chance to socialise face-to-face; in the ‘old-fashioned’ way. I’m sitting here, on the underside of the planet, where I guess I feel safe to wonder such things, but I wonder what women get out of meeting fellow bloggers? Do any get pinched by the little gremlin of jealousy? Of envy? Of awe? Do they get out of the experience all that they’ve hoped for? I must admit; I've struggled this week. I've returned from a month's holiday, from (enforced and situational) unplugging. So, if I read your blog, you might've noticed I've not been around for a while. Or have you? So the other night, I sat down to hundreds and hundreds of unread feeds from my favourite blogs. Do you know what I felt? Dread. A weight of unconquerable labour was gently massaging my head, about to drop completely. Could I really sift through all these posts? Did I want to? These people were my 'friends'. What did I do? I hit 'delete all'*; taking me back to nothingness. It was a relief: so what in the hell kind of friend am I? It doesn't seem I've changed very much from when I was a child, abandoning my long-distance pen-pal, does it? I would never knock on a RL friend's door after a month's absence, poke my head through, ask her what she's been up to for the past month, and when she's about to reply, I just put up my hand and say, "Hang on, not interested. Let's just continue our friendship from...now." So why do I do it online? And why am I confessing this secret here, where many of you are my friends, and I am fully expecting an irate retaliation (which I may or may not deserve). What kind of friend are you? Do you do the same? How do you justify your blogging practice? Or have you been more sensible than I and decided not to follow any sort of self-imposed policy? Or do you suspect, as I do, that I think way too much about all this. Fullstop. Period. *On about 75% of them, as it turned out. I checked. But it's still a lot! Crossposted at Blogrhet.