Andy Chase

Nearly two years after I wrote this, journalists are for some reason still scratching their heads over why the unwashed masses enjoy maintaining weblogs.

The latest in-depth look at the lives of teenage bloggers? "My So-Called Blog" by Emily Nussbaum of the New York Times.

Emily's article is at least a departure from the usual smug snarkfests by everybody's favorite windbag, but it still comes across as an effort by a "Real Writer" to make a mountain out of the weblog molehill.

This is what we learn from "My So-Called Blog": teenagers spend lots of time writing things in their weblogs, and a lot of it is very personal. So personal, in fact, that the overall tone of the article is "Those blogging teenagers are meddling with powers they can't possibly comprehend!". For example:

A result of all this self-chronicling is that the private experience of adolescence -- a period traditionally marked by seizures of self-consciousness and personal confessions wrapped in layers and hidden in a sock drawer -- has been made public. Peer into an online journal, and you find the operatic texture of teenage life with its fits of romantic misery, quick-change moods and sardonic inside jokes. Gossip spreads like poison. Diary writers compete for attention, then fret when they get it. And everything parents fear is true. (For one thing, their children view them as stupid and insane, with terrible musical taste.) But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy -- a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison.

Oh, please. Substitute "bull session at Perkins" for "online journal", and all the above paragraph describes is the same teenage experience that kids in America have had for probably the last 50 years, if not longer. The difference is that in a lot of ways, it's easier to find sympathetic people with like interests on the internet than it is in the tangled web of high school-style social interaction; Your pimples, last-year's fashions, and general social ineptitude don't show on the internet.

As for how personal some of this stuff is, when was the last time you went reading a bunch of teenage weblogs when you weren't researching an article about them? The fact that the stuff is out there for everyone to see doesn't mean everyone is necessarily going to see it. Give teenagers some credit; they're savvy enough to know whether or not their parents are likely to netstalk them and read their deepest, darkest online confessions. They can censor themselves accordingly, or just use a pseudonym.

At the end of the day, the fact remains that people like writing weblogs, even though they don't get paid, or even necessarily have anything profound to say. It's really not a big deal, no matter how much Real Writers want it to be.