Once some people learn that I have a 7-year old blog which shows no signs of stopping, they inevitably ask me: “Why do you blog?” Indeed, why does anybody blog? That is the question. And the answer seems to be this: It is perhaps the only way for people in the Internet Age to offer a buffered kind of contact in a time when one easily drowns in the constant deluge of immediate communication.

The operative word here is “buffer”: blogging, thus, is a form of communication that blunts the edges of instantaneousness. Blogging, one can say, is a very modern way of hankering back to the simplicity of old days when to communicate did not ask of anyone the sometimes impossible ability to multitask, or to shrink and panic under the demands of answering too many messages brought in by our too-reliable Information Age machines.

Let me explain further by asking you to imagine how we go through a typical day in our technologically-charged reality. It is a life increasingly governed by the ease and immediacy of fax machines, photocopiers, the Internet, iPods, laptops, cellphones, and Blueberrys. It is a life where communication is fast and demands fast response, such as in SMS, emailing, chatting, and instant messaging. In the digital age, everything is instant, like our coffee.

It is easy enough to trumpet the benefits of such instantaneous culture. I, for one, have benefited greatly from the technology that has made life easier for most of us. Once, due to my unfortunate forgetfulness, I still managed to plan and execute an entire poetry reading event with only four hours to spare before the scheduled time, and this I was able to do because of one device: my cellphone. Last night, to prepare for this talk, I zapped through Google Scholar to consult information in a way that used to be impossible in the days before digital, that analog past that now seems so quaint, so slow.

But nobody has ever thought out fully what effect this instantaneousness of our age has impacted our own psychology. One possible result may be the characteristic passivity, maybe even laziness, that seems to infect many members of the so-called Generation Text. Older generations complain about how this current generation seems to have no interest in anything, be it politics or popular culture. In an age of instant gratification and the availability of so much choices, the response of young people today seem to be withdrawal. Patience and hard work as requisite virtues seem to be on the wane, or so older people say.

      And yet, it is interesting to note that there is one kind of communication medium that seems to become exponentially popular in the Internet Age—and more so among young people. This is highly ironic if we are to take as sociological truth the passivity of the current generation. That communication medium, of course, is blogging. From the few hundred blogs that started the phenomenon in the 1990s, as of 2008, Technorati—the most reliable tracker of blogs today—estimates that there are 50 million blogs in existence, and reports that the number is still growing fast.

I must take note now that while it is generally said that blogging is a grassroots form of journalism, the vast majority of blogs are actually written by ordinary people for much smaller audiences, and for more personal agenda. Overall, the allure of blogs combine the immediacy of up-to-the-minute posts with a strong sense of the author’s personality, passions, and point of view.

Thinking about it now, there are actually several blogging practices that can be cited as common among most bloggers. The posting of entries are often frequent, although frequency is highly relative: some bloggers post multiple times a day, others once a month. Some people stop blogging after inadvertently hurting other people with their posts, and others stop because of plain burn-out. The posts also often range from the very personal to the highly impersonal. Entries, too, can be processed and written instantaneously, although sometimes a blogger can struggle with something to say.

There is also a great diversity in blogging, with bloggers covering assorted topics. While most blogs are personal chronicles of ordinary lives, others blog about politics, entertainment, literature, hobbies, and causes. There are pornographic blogs, and vegetarian blogs. There are conservative blogs, witchcraft blogs, computer blogs, psychology blogs, travel blogs, pet blogs, cooking blogs, poetry blogs, technology blogs, and fashion blogs. There are blogs that link other blogs (which are called filter blogs), and there are blogs that criticize other blogs. There are blogs that tell you how to make money with your blog. Some blogs feature only videos, which are then called “vlogs.” Some feature sound entries, which are called “podcasts.”

Who reads this blogs? Who knows? But there are popular blogs who are ranked by Technorati via the number of links they command and the traffic they generate. Most blogs remain completely unknown and unheralded. But there is one thing one should know about bloggers: most bloggers are also acutely aware of their readers, and it can be said that authors learn to calibrate what they should and should not reveal. This I will discuss further later on.

I first ventured into blogging more than five years ago with a blog I called “The Secret Tango Dancer,” which soon became “How to Live,” which also soon became “The Spy in the Sandwich.” How do I choose these names? God knows how. They just sounded “interesting” to me. You will take note, however, that I had randomly abandoned one blog and then created another in the course of half a decade until I finally settled into this last one. Blogging then can be taken in as an evolution of an online personality—we evolve with it until the skin feels just right.

My reasons for starting blogging were, for the most part, entirely haphazard. But I think I began my first blog for sure because I hated the whole intricate business of emailing—especially email that contains practically the same information we copy-and-paste for a variety of recipients. Emailing seemed too intrusive, and demanding. Blogging, on the other hand, seemed to me like the perfect recourse to that tedious process of correspondence in the age of instant communication: with just one click of the “publish” button, we communicate with a network of friends and family almost instantly, and get feedback almost as instantly as well. What’s more, the feedback mechanism is quite leisurely and holds no demand: readers choose when to comment, and bloggers choose when to reply, if we want to reply at all. To Be Concluded