Blogging, what's the point?

May 6, 2005

Because it's the run-up to Bloggforum 2.0, I once again feel at liberty to indulge in shameless metablogging. Consider this some early personal notes for the panel discussion, "Blogging, what's the point?"A good friend complained last week, "You used to write funny stories about Swedes. Now your blog is just about numbers," the implication being, I'm guessing here, that Swedes are more interesting than numbers.

It's true that Swedes are funnier, but they're no longer new. From September 2002, when I first arrived in Stockholm, until about September 2004, Sweden was an exotic place — beautiful and efficient on the surface, though with a full complement of quirks and perplexities that were a pleasure to root out and drape across my blog.

Expat blogging was possible for as long as Swedes were them and I was me. But now these identities have begun to blur. Not so much in the abstract, nationalist sense (I'm a dedicated post-nationalist), but on the level of daily personal interactions. Speaking everyday Swedish is now semi-automatic; and paying Swedish taxes has led to a steady erosion of my traditional ironic detachment when contemplating local political shenanigans and judicial cock-ups. If I'm paying for my stake in Swedish society, and I can't vote here, then I'll damn well blog here, goes the thinking.

So the cutesy expat phase of this blog is definitely overI'm afraid we'll never know what it was that I hated most about Stockholm., replaced by a more haranguing tone when blogging Sweden (usually because it tends to concern group think, civil liberties, and freedom of speech). But that's not the first time my interests have shifted. There was a phase in 2002 when I wrote often about about Israel and Palestine. Ditto about the Iraq war in 2003. And yes, now, number theory.

I have an admiration for one-issue bloggers who have the convictions to harp on about the same theme day-in day-out, but I find myself visiting such blogs less frequently after a while, because variations on a theme inevitably prove less attractive than whole new themes. I myself blog to learn, as a means of thinking through and then articulating a coalescing world view that I try to make as consistent as possible before it solidifies. But then I need to move on, otherwise I get repetitious, bored and hence boring.

In the end, it boils down to this: I don't want to blog from a position of authority; I want to blog from a position of discovery. I think that is the secret of the relative longevity of this particular blog — it is driven by my inconstant interests. Fortunately, these interests on occasion intersect with those of readers.

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