Why Are We Here - Why Do Bloggers Blog?

I suppose everybody asks the question sooner or later - what am I doing here? We ask it in the first grade. We probably asked it the day we were born, we just didn't have the language yet. We ask it on the job. After so many years of marriage. We look up and down the streets where we live and there it is, the same question.

But I am asking the question right here, the part of me that's invested in this project, a blog.

Okay, so you go into any project with some idea of why you've decided to approach it. Unless you're one of those people who rush forward blindly, shoved by an instinctive drive just to do. Anything. A sort of unthought out mania that drives people to do things like paint their house purple or dig up the entire back yard in order to grow arugula hoping to sell it at the farmers' market but run out of gas before the first crop comes in.

People have blogs or write articles online to express themselves. Empty nesters suddenly h;ave time on their hands; retirees decide they are fonts of wisdom. Others need an outlet for political rants or paranoid theories. Suddenly, there is a free avenue for expression.

Other have faith in get-rich-quick schemes or just hope to make a little pin money on adclicks. I, myself, since my first entry into the world of online writing, have earned the equivalent of a can of beans a day. Not too shabby. If you like beans.

Then, there is the little discussed mental aberation called hypergraphia, the drive to write continuously. Not all hypergraphics are Joyce Carol Oateses. Many write inarticulate drivel, pen gibberish that floats mostly unread out in cyberspace.

Hypergraphia may be America's best kept secret. It isn't even recognized on spell check! Millions of us churn out words, the letters on our keyboards eroding under our fingertips by the maniac outpouring of cyber jabber. And the folks at Google encourage this quiet perversion in the persuit of ad click revenue.

The new salesman of America isn't tearing his hair out in a minimalist office cubicle or driving around town with a Homburg hat in the passenger seat; tying and loosening his tie repeatedly like Jack Lemon in Glengarry Glen Ross with sweat stained armpits, grinding his teeth into nubs as he's pressured to close the deal.
It's a quiet act of desparation. Finding your niche market, tearing through the pages of Vanity Fair and Vogue to see what's going to be hot this coming season and reading up on the latest trends in search engine optimization.

But is that the worse thing in the world? Not long ago, the folks at universities and businesses complained that people couldn't write anymore. They seemed to have lost the capacity to make use of their own language. First year Armenian immigrants made better grades in English class than people who spoke English since they were 15 months old.

At least, now, people write. Everybody writes. It's popular and fun! So they tell you to write in language best understood by 6th graders. so, you write up memior pieces about how lovely your grandmother was only you didn't realize it until she was dead. Or how you were abused by your step-father but pulled yourself up by the bootstraps to become a functional person who appreciates rainbows and takes in one-eyed cats.

At the end of the day, at least we are writing. We are making use of the English language. Letter writing might be dead but article writing rules!