Why do I blog?

Is there a purpose to blogging - when does it become an additiction? On Sunday, during the plane ride down to Aruba I read Emily Gould's Blog-post confidential in the New York TImes magazine, and while lazing on the beach I caught up with Business Week by reading Beyond Blogs. On the one hand, from the journalist's perspective, the only satisfaction lies in creating blog posts that elict thousands of responses, and for this one must expose one's intimate life on the web: addictive maybe, but hardly for me, especially with a daughter who does not hestitate to remind me to remove from my posts all traces that might point back to the "real me." My followers -- if there are any beyond IBM1972 -- probably knew more than enough about me before I began blogging. On the other hand, from the business perspective, "everyone blogs," if only to create the pretense of a social network that might turn into a business proposition. Certainly I began beacuse I was under the impression that everyone but me blogged, and I needed to hone that skill during my sabbatical semester.

I'd intended to blog about my research -- and I do try to leave traces of my daily toils. But the solid "back of the article" type of work that occupies most of my time isn't really the stuff of engaging scholarly discourse. Once my collected thoughts are ready for that I'd rather go to a listserve or, better yet, have a Skype conversation with my coauthor. I'm not going to risk being scooped in a journal article because of my blog-vanities. Maybe at the end I'll collect up all my research posts and send them as a sabbatical report to the Provost. Will that become a (college of) business model?

Yes, I do attend to my social network, using my ethnographer's eye and artless photos to reinforce my persona as a professional nomad. The question still to be answered is will I return to my Roncalli Hall 262 office carrying the same bundle of goods and chattels as when I left? What river will I be stepping into (with Heraclitus) on my return? Who cares? Hardly any of the people who read the professionals' articles and thought them a (further) waste of words.