What Is Blogging?

Jason Kottke has an interesting post here in which he compares blogging to vaudeville. 

He writes:

Image via 3:AM Magazine

"Not sure if I’ve ever mentioned this on here before, but I often think of blogging as vaudeville to social media’s moving pictures (aka 'movies')." 

His post was inspired by another post by Tim Bray about blogging.

He writes:

"The great dan­ger is that the Web’s fu­ture is mall-like: No space re­al­ly pub­lic, no store­fronts but na­tion­al brands’, no vi­su­als com­posed by am­a­teurs, noth­ing that’s on of­fer just for its own sake, and for love."

I like both of these considerations a lot. Writing this post, a line from one of the world's greatest photojournalists, James Nachtwey, came to mind:

"I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony."

Here's what Merriam-Webster says about what it means to bear witness:

"to show that something exists or is true"

That's my experience of blogging. That it's the act of bearing witness to one's life, that writing it down in public is a way of showing that one exists and one's life is true, that to blog is to insist that one is real and that one's existence is deserving of being witnessed by the world.