Why Am I in Blogland?

This image is from one of my earliest surviving online journal pages. (Note that the links on this page do not work. But Mighty Kymm is still around here.) But my seduction into Blogland came earlier.

It was around 1993. A friend of mine had given me a free copy of Prodigy and I have a really fast modem. You know, like 1200 baud. Prior to this I had posted on Usenet groups. But it was there on Prodigy where I got hooked to really plugging into everyday lives without a real topic. For some reason some people who could write did it, in front of each other. Maybe in the form of a journal of their day, maybe with flights into fantasy. Prodigy had these different bulletin boards. One was 'Arts.' Someone (was it me? I have no idea) skipped down through the topics (I'm sure they were things like movies, theater, visual arts??) and discovered 'Other.' We posted a subject 'Austin Arts' and then posted notes and replies and discussed everything and anything. There was no place on the boards to have this kind of free-wheeling 'off topic' discussion. The kind that is not uncommon between journal writers with their comments or different bulletin boards today. Occasionally, I think, we were cited for being off-topic or had to move around.

It seemed to me that writing online like this and having other people see your words, hear about your mundane life, comment on it, use new words around it, relate their experiences to yours was a dream fulfilled. In the end, this corner (cul-de-sac, cave?) of cyberspace attracted a young man who was orginally from Baton Rouge and living in Austin and working as a hospital or doctor's admin assistant, another young man who was working part-time at the IRS, a woman who lived in Baton Rouge, a woman who lived in Hawaii but who was moving to Austin with her Japanese-American husband to retire, a woman living in Wimberley, a man living in California who grew up in Austin and others, including, at one point, a thirteen-year-old firl living in Colorado. I loved hearing about lives and I loved seeing my own words in pixels, commented on by others. We built a considerable common community, sharing other's fantasies and stories. There was less to do online then, but it was easy to see that the community-building potential was there. I met all the people mentioned above in real life, too, except for the thirteen-year-old kid in Colorado. If I'm not mistaken, even then, her parents were suspicious of her talking to adults! We developed our own sense of community through shared writing with a vague connection to Austin. And Arts. The connection was vague indeed. There was a nebulous spiritual aspect to some of it and a pilgrimage to a street memorial to a cat. [I explain some of this whole cyber connection on that linked WEB page.]

When the Prodigy connection evaporated and I saw personal WEB pages, I had to have one. Our first ISP gave us some space, I think, and I used the composer in Netscape and started writing about my life. I did it because I loved to read other people's descriptions of their seemingly mundane realities. I found it fascinating that someone could talk about the contents of their drawers, their shopping trips or a book they were reading and engage other people, all over the world. I wanted to have that dialogue. And I have. I still don't understand it, however. Why do people want to expose part of themselves this way? Why do I? FFP only tried it for a short time. He participated in the Prodigy thing and he wrote maybe five entries in an online journal. He puts his energy into things that are published in the traditional way. But I have written hundreds and hundreds of rambling diary entries (I use that word diary intentionally) and essays and free verse. I have posted hundreds of pictures of everything from the ridiculous to the sublime.

I can't say why I do it. It puzzles me even as I write this sentence and prepare to send it to the Holidailies portal.