Why blog?

I mean, come on, the Internet is crawling with self-important people creating blogs. What makes this site so great that it has earned a slice of your precious time?

Well, to be honest, this site isn’t for you. It is mostly for me.

Writing is like a muscle – if you want to get stronger you need to exercise and be challenged. The simple fact is that I need to become a stronger writer. The ability to write empirical papers is critical to being an academic. The phrase ‘publish or die’ is often overheard in higher education. For some time I have been privately creating short summaries of research articles. Still, this was discussion for a knowledgeable audience that I know quite well: myself. I need more experience writing for a more general group of people. Creating content that can be read around the world ought to do the trick.

The curious part about writing for the weblog is that I will always have an audience, even if nobody visits the site. As humans endowed with the capacity for social cognition we often judge our actions in relation to an ‘imaginary audience’. We have all experienced the imaginary audience at one time or another – that odd feeling that the entire world is observing and judging us. This feeling seems to be especially prevalent in the egocentrism of adolescence. Because, of course, we were just going to DIE because we knew the whole world was staring at the new pimple on our face. Everyone was looking at us. Everyone was judging us. Constantly.

Now, in a way, the entire world can pay attention to these words. Everyone in the world can judge them. Constantly.

This blog is a personal means to an end. I need an audience for my works, imaginary or no. If you happen to be a conscious human being then so much the better – I hope the site is worth your time. Still, even if you don’t actually exist, as long as the intangible ‘you’ is out there I will always have someone to write for. I hope prefrontal.org is worth it for ‘you’ too.

July 27, 2007 • Posted in: Meta

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