Blogs have become an interesting phenomenon within recent years. People are perfectly willing to share the innermost secrets of their lives with perfect strangers. This may lead one to believe that this is realism at its finest—there are no layers of producers, editors, or anyone else. It is just a person and their keyboard. Yet blogs are still not realistic. Human nature causes utter Realism to still be a fantasy.
I myself have been an avid blogger for over six years. My early blogs were rather candid and sweet. Unfortunately I have lost the URLs to them now and have no idea where they are on cyberspace. In fact, I ended up meeting my current fiancé through my blog. He was a friend of my friend’s and found it through a link on her blog. He thought an entry I had written about attempting to save a seagull very sweet and decided to contact me via instant messaging. Currently I have two blogs, both on a site called Livejournal. One I have had since 2004 and is located at http://blackholecali.livejournal.com. That is the blog where I am most honest about myself, as all of the entries are Friends Locked so no stranger can happen upon them. I do not add people I know in real life because I’ve discovered it makes me less truthful and I cannot vent as easily as I would wish. I have a few internet friends I have made and grown very close with, closer than some of my “real life” friends. My other blog is a public book reviewing journal and is located at http://booksforfood.livejournal.com. I am far more impersonal on this journal because I do not have near as much control over who reads it. I mostly review books, films, or other cultural events I go to. It’s mostly a networking tool to meet other like-minded people to become friends with.
Humans self-edit. No matter how truthful one is, we filter out facts that make us look bad, or facts we promised not to divulge about others, or we withhold information that may hurt the friends that actually read the blogs. A blogger may exaggerate their views or what they do in order to generate more hits or visits to said blog. No matter how hard one tries, a person cannot fully show their life in print . This breaks away from fiction, as the fodder for their blogs is (usually) actually factual, yet they still fictionalize and sensationalize their life to entertain others.
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