Chris Bowers unloads here about what blogging has done to his consciousness, sense of self, and general life. Money quote:
Try to imagine this: spend a week where you write for about sixty-five hours. Now, consider the following conditions on that writing:
* Whatever you write will be read by tens of thousands of people
* The material and research you use to produce that writing will almost never be of a personal nature.
* What you write must mesh with a perceived set of expectations of the content you have previously published.
* This is done almost entirely in virtual space, where your contacts take place over email, in comment threads, and on the front-page websites. Overall, you hve little human contact with either your colleagues or audience.If you did this for a week, you might start to sense, however slightly, your ego merging with your writing. If you do it for three years, at some point you might notice that your ego has been largely subsumed into this activity. Think about this. First, your thoughts are always directed outward toward matters that do not directly refer to you. Second, commentary on you is always directed toward your writing and your blog, never to you personally. Third, there is basically no one with whom you can commiserate about your activities on a daily, or even weekly, basis. If you do this long enough, eventually your sense of self will be largely subsumed into the activity of blogging, and even into your actual blog. And maybe your blog connects to other blogs, and even to a wider movement. Your sense of self can be merged with those institutions as well.
It’s now over six years for me. I don’t feel the same way, and that may have something to do with the fact that I feel no part of any "movement" (the minute I did, I’d do my best to leave it). I also feel immensely connected personally to my readers, even though they never appear visually as more than email addresses. It helps that I had a pretty clear idea of what being a writer was before I jumped into this new medium. I’ve always seen blogging as a new medium and a new genre – but it’s still, for me, a form of writing. And, although my writing is inextricable from my life, it is also clearly separate. Even when I blog about myself, I write about a public self, not the real self. A blog is a mask, as all writing is. (See: Nietzsche, F.)
I get the creeps sometimes when I realize my friends and even my fiance read the blog and my blog and my life blur. I want a boundary but inevitably that boundary is porous. I can live with that, but it requires vigilance. The few weeks a year I stop blogging are a kind of elysium for me. The ability to have a thought and just kick it around for a while, the chance to think nothing, the chance to read at a leisured pace, or to have dinner with a friend in the knowledge that afterwards, you won’t have to check the blog: bliss. Next week, in my winter break, I hope to hang with some friends in NYC, maybe even stay out late and not worry about the 7 am post the next day. Joy to the world!
But the impact of blogging is not as scary as television. I do a fair bit but I have kept my distance from any serious gig because I really do want to maintain some semblance of normal life. TV destroys it. It interacts with your mental health like acid on wood. It makes it impossible to go places without having your public persona and politics follow you. Some of that is inevitable in public life; some is avoidable. But blogging is mild in comparison. I’ve seen the impact of TV on a few friends and I have to say I wonder how any of them stay sane. I guess, in the long run, most of them don’t.
The Dish 