FROM POST TO POST

WHY DO WE BLOG? The obvious answer is, SELF-EXPRESSION. As the title of my blog says, if you've got it inside you, why not bring it out? In this way, we COMMUNICATE, not just with others, but also with ourselves, with our latent confidence.

WHAT DO WE BLOG ABOUT? As far as I can see, there are two broad categories: CONFESSIONS and OPINIONS.

By CONFESSIONS, I don't mean only the head-bowed-in-front-of-priest kind of confession of guilts and grudges. Any kind of auto-biographical revealing of the self - our feelings, our history, our very personal hopes and hates - is a confession. Such blogs are like diaries - a heartfelt, genuine attempt to reveal the PERSON within us. Such HONESTY has its own appeal to the viewer of the blog.

By OPINIONS, I mean a kind of commentary on the world around us. What we think about incidents, ideas, concepts and causes. Our interests, wishlists, cribsheets. They project the PERSONA we construct for ourselves. And it's the WIT (in the older sense of 'intelligence') that appeals to a viewer.

The title of an old book, THE MIRROR AND THE LAMP (by M H Abrams), sums up the difference. CONFESSIONS are like LAMPS to illuminate the self within; OPINIONS are the MIRRORS with which we view the world outside.

As for me, I am still too Web-wary to CONFESS. My Posts are usually OPINIONS. But our OPINIONS also inadvertently reveal parts of our hidden self, and our CONFESSIONS are part of our self-fashioning. But that's another story....