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If Bloggers aren't writers, what am I doing here?


I just finished reading this article by Rebecca Thorman about how Bloggers are not writers.  And while I see her point that to some extent many Bloggers are not writers they are simply people jumping on the social media train I think you'll find that there are quite a few blogs out there whose authors are truly writers.  


If a writer is simply someone who commits his or her thoughts and feelings to words I think that there is an entire blogosphere full of writers.  I read a number of blogs who do not write to receive comments from hundreds of people or who are trying to self-promote with their blogs.  They write simply to send their thoughts into the void.  Maybe they get a comment, maybe they don't.  But they write simply to write for the therapy of it.  And I think that is a true writer.  Someone who puts their thoughts or feelings into words for their own sake, not necessarily for someone else's.  



"We posit ourselves into believing that we’re taking down the establishment, but we’re only contributing to the dull masses, eager for mega numbers of comments, subscribers, fans and followers, and other easily influenced analytics. In an age where anyone can be famous with the push of “Publish,” we have lost the creation of enduring legacies that enthuse, provoke and delight."
I'm not looking to take down the establishment.  I simply have a thought and want to put it out there, people choose to read, to react just as I have chosen to react to Ms. Thorman's post.  Blogging can be conversation, it can be advertising, it can be contributing to the dull masses at times, but most importantly it can be writing.  Not always, not every post is a masterpiece worthy of being put into one's published works, but there are poets, and novelists, and short-story writers who all began with blogs and continue to write there.  So at the very least if you do not want to consider blogging "real writing" at least consider it practice, consider it our generation's version of the moleskin notebook where thoughts and ideas are penciled in, changed, erased, deleted, and remade into something new.  


Writing is a process and a blog is seeing that process all laid out in front of you.  It's seeing the draft before you know what the final copy is going to look like.  


I am a blogger.  Somedays I am having a conversation, somedays I am rambling, and somedays...I am a writer.

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