Why Blog?

http://cogito-thought.blogspot.com/2007/11/why-blog.html

A question which is fair game to anyone who authors a blog is “why?” I’ve been asked this quite a few times myself, so here are a few of my reasons, in approximate order of priority:

1. To explicitly state my thoughts somewhere besides my mind. I have a lot of random thoughts/ideas/interpretations, and if I only state them in my own head I tend to either never follow up on them because there are too many, or I find that my subconscious tries to remind me of them at inopportune moments (this is similar to the phenomenon of “too much stuff” as described by David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done). I tried a journal, but found that I was still keeping the key components of the idea in my head. With a blog, however, I have an audience, and therefore have to communicate the entire idea.

2. To create a record of my thoughts in progress. It’s nice to be able to look back and see how a certain idea was formed or developed, and this was actually the impetus to start the blog in the first place: Some friends wanted to see the thought process behind some of my ideas.

3. Writing is fun

4. To create a repository of personal statements/answers to common questions. This way, if someone asks, for example, what my views on the student shocked with a Taser are (yes, I know, old news), I can just provide him a link instead of explaining again and again. This post is partly an example of this reason.

Pretty an exact articulation of my answers to the little devil’s advocate inside my head who keeps asking me why I keep sitting here typing for like the 3 people who will probably ever read this. Especially 2. I’m kind of obsessed with the idea that a mind starts out as a blank slate that’s then shaped by everything that it senses, that the state of a person’s mind, and even their thoughts and actions are just the result of things that have happened to the person, things that they’ve seen, books that they’ve read. An extremely complex chain of dominoes.

Anyway, that’s why I started blogging in the first place. To trace the evolution of my mind.

08:02 AM | 0 Comments

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