Lola Rogers

My little blog

From consumer to producer, or: who’s listening out there?

Isn’t a blog a sort of ongoing public diary, where people write about their lives, or some pet subject, every day or every week, like clockwork?

I certainly had no intention of keeping a public record of my life, and I have never been blessed (or cursed) with a hobby, or an axe to grind, that interested me enough that I could find something to say about it that would be worthy of publication on any kind of regular basis.

I had been out for a long walk in Helsinki one day last autumn, taking photographs of the damp Helsinki fogginess, and I wanted to show them to the folks back home in the U.S. I started keeping a blog while working and studying in Finland, as a surprise for my friends and family.

Instead of sending the photos by e-mail and clogging up their servers, I found an easy-to-use free blog host, posted the photos, and published the page that same evening. It was easier than I had imagined.

I think I had the idea at the time that those photos might be all I ever posted on the page, but the next day it occurred to me to post a link to a video I had seen that my husband might be interested in. While I was at it, I might as well include something about that interesting collection of old newspaper illustrations that I had long admired. Then the next day I thought of something else to post, and then something else, and before I knew it, I was a blogger.

In the beginning, I didn’t call it a blog. I just called it my web page. Anyway, isn’t there something silly about a blog? Isn’t it a bit like a vanity press, an outlet for people who can’t get a real job as a writer? That wasn’t me at all. I wasn’t even writing much on my page. I just used it to post pictures and videos and things; the kind of stuff I might tell my friends about if I saw them in person. Just internet small-talk, not really ‘blogging’.

But it doesn’t matter what you call it; if you have a public web page, and you add things to it regularly, it’s a blog, and you are a blogger. There’s no point in denying it. I think I realised this when I found a comment on my page from a complete stranger. My friends and family had posted comments to the page before, just to please me, which was fun. It was like playing blogger. But when someone I didn’t even know commented on some of my photos, it gave me a peculiar feeling, as if the configuration of relationships between myself and the larger world had subtly shifted. I realised that I was no longer just an internet consumer, but also a producer. I wasn’t just the audience, I was part of the show.

I’m not afraid to call myself a blogger any more. Blogging is just a matter of stepping out of the audience to take part in the discussion. After all these years of consuming media, watching and listening and never participating, blogging is a chance to use media in a more natural way. It’s a chance to have a part, however tiny, in the show; to make small-talk, indulge in silly vanity, or grind axes, for anyone who might be interested, and maybe to find out that somebody out there is listening.

http://chawedrosin.wordpress.com