“Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation,” Tyler Cowen wrote me. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant. He explained: “Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.”
A fascinating idea. As I blogged earlier, James Pennebaker, a professor at UT Austin, has done many studies of the therapeutic effects of keeping a journal. A book on therapeutic journaling gives “examples of how expressive writing can improve the immune system and lung function,” according to its website. Do blogging and keeping a journal supply something important to human health and happiness present in Stone Age life but now usually missing? My self-experimentation about faces suggests Stone Agers had a lot more face-to-face conversations in the morning than most of us. Could they have been more listened to than most of us?
Addendum: Right after I wrote this, I read a post about interviewing people for a book. “They don’t have to be prompted; they’re utterly compelled to tell their stories,” the interviewer wrote. For a term project, one of my students interviewed homeless people. He noticed something similar. Whatever the solution to homelessness, he concluded, it would involve a lot of listening.
Other interesting things to explore about blogging: what is the effect on the blogger of fawning commenters? Contentious (but respectful) commenters? Me-too commenters?
I started my blog 2.5 years ago when I left my job and started grad school, so it is hard to parse out why the following happened:
– I write higher quality first drafts.
– I have a better sense for what others will find interesting.
– My short term memony for interesting stories to tell others has improved.
– My tolerance for reading something that doesn’t make its point in the first two sentences is now zero.
It certainly makes you better person. Its gives a chance to all those intovert people to makes thier voices heard, develop senseof confidence in them. Helps them face the world in a better way. It is a established fact that public spekers, stage artists and leaders enjoy a more confidnet life style than others , blogging gives every one a option to develop this confidence.. i call this virtual reality..
“Develop a sense of confidence.” Maybe so. If you write about whatever you want and people continue to read . . . Another thing is that with a blog, all your readers are sympathetic — there are a billion other things (literally) they could be reading.