amazing technicolor dreambloat

A curious reader from Fergus Falls, MN writes to ask:

don't take offense, this is really just curiosity: would you say that your enjoyment of blogging has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same since you started? what makes it fun? do you think you'll get tired of it soon, or will it just continually bloat your sense of self-importance so that it becomes harder and harder for you to stop?

Hmm, let's take these one at a time.

would you say that your enjoyment of blogging has increased, decreased, or stayed about the same since you started?

I would say that I'm in a period of diminished enthusiasm for the weblog right now, as evidenced by the low volume of recent posts. I don't know if this means that I'm losing interest in the sense that I will it up. It was always an experiment, after all, and a way to feel part of the zeitgeist. I have vowed to myself that I would not do this if it ever felt like it was a chore to maintain. So as long as I'm continuing to write posts, it can be taken to mean that I must be enjoying myself.

what makes it fun?

I think the fun part of it for me is that it's a way of doing something (very) modestly creative during the day. I know, I know, my job should be affording all kinds of creative adventures in social research, but let's not talk about that right now. I also the weblog appeals to the archival impulse that has always run strong within me. I don't think I have either the pontificative urges of the people who run political weblogs or the emotional-exhibitionist-urges of people who write weblogs that are deeply personal, introspective diaries.

do you think you'll get tired of it soon, or it will just continually bloat your sense of self-importance so that it becomes harder and harder for you to stop?

As I said, I could grow tired of this any day. In my case, I don't really think it has resulted in any bloating of a sense of self-importance in the first place, much less some kind of addictive bloating. Maybe even the opposite, actually, as it's led me to reflect more on our society's widescale search for self-expansion that I think it part of the Rise of the Blog. People find so many ways to delude themselves into believing they are of far greater consequence than they are, and weblogging is yet another technology by which the self-deceptive trick is accomplished.

Speaking more generally about weblogging, I do think that sense-of-self-importance does have something to do with many people's putting themselves out there; as with many causal relationships, however, it's hard for me to see how much of it is people with inflated senses of themselves selecting into blogging vs. blogging itself contributing to further one's sense of self-importance.