On Blogging

There are several types of blog on the internet, and people who are in the habit of reading blogs will probably at this point be nodding along and well aware of what I’m talking about. There are the ones that re-hash old stuff by other people on one specific topic, there are those who create content on one specific topic, and there are one that reblog everything they’ve ever read on the internet about anything.

Now, broadly speaking, I try to keep this blog on topic and about my adventures in Sweden and the process that brought me there (as well as anything related to coming home, because it’s quite odd having reverse culture shock). This post is off topic, again, as it’s more to do with blogging in and of itself. I will confess, I do have other blogs. I’ve been blogging on and off for somewhere in the region of thirteen years, and I’ve never quite been able to kick the habit.

That’s right: my first blog was started back when I was either ten or eleven. It was back in the days when Frank the Goat ruled the world. It was when internet shopping was rare and Facebook hadn’t even been dreamt of. It was a pretty random blog – mostly full of copied and pasted things from other blogs, quizzes, a bit of grumbling about people. Of course – everything was friends-locked, but it was a lot of fun, and I maintained it on and off until I went to university. About a year ago i deleted my account there, but I still have downloaded copies of it all, and I’m sure, the internet being as it is, that there are scraps of it still floating through the aether of the net.

What else? I’ve had a couple of anonymous blogs, which were very short lived. I ran a couple of news things too, and a poetry blog for a bit. Oh, and my Tumblr account, which is still going, and is the main reason why I manage to keep most of this particular blog free of too many completely random memes, Gifsets and other such things. I’ll admit that the majority of content of my tumblr comes through the couple of friends I have on there, and that it’s broadly filled with reblogs of the content that I see from them. I don’t use it often really, but it always shocks me how full it is when i take a good look at it. In fact, my tumblr consists almost entirely of what my Livejournal feed once consisted of, only with less personal content.

And it was earlier, whilst I was looking through my Tumblr that a thought struck me:

Whilst I am perfectly happy with everyone having access to this blog ( which, whilst about my actual life, and perfectly easy to work out who exactly i am from) I would be absolutely terrified if anyone  that I didn’t know had my tumblr was to come up to me and suddenly quote something from my tumblr. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the easiest way to terrify a considerable number of people in this world these days is not in fact, to tell them, I know where you live – oh no- everyone knows that. The NSA know that, and with a little sense anyone with a bit of knowhow could track me down with GPS. The scary thing to tell someone is actually ‘I’ve read your tumblr’. It would be even more terrifying to not say that, and to simply quote their tumblr’s title to them.

Why is it so scary? I’m not sure. Maybe it’s because reblogging something is so easy to do and happens almost as a  stream-of-consciousness process, if you understand what I mean. Maybe it’s because a tumblr feed can tell you so much about what a person finds interesting – like looking at the posters on their wall or the draw full of things that they keep as keepsakes in their bedroom. Maybe it’s some other reason, but for now:

I’m reading.

 

(P.S: I know that last bit got a bit dramatic, but it sounded so wonderfully ominous that I couldn’t resist XD)