"How Can You Blog About Mowing the Yard?"

Yesterday morning as I left the study in our home, my husband asked if I had been e-mailing all that time. I replied, "No, I was blogging," to which his response was, "How can you blog about mowing the yard?" I laughed and said, "You're funny!" I have to admit I am not a big blog reader, but I know there are literally millions out there online. It made me think a little about the difference though between blogs and twitters. As I understand the world of twitter, though I have never tried it, one posts a tiny message of 100 characters or so, basically telling what he or she is doing at the moment. As I think about both methods of discourse, I prefer not to be limited to actions only; I would rather speak of ideas, hopes, and dreams.

I remember keeping a diary as a young adolescent. As I read passages from it today, I am amused that I wrote only my daily activities, i. e. "I went to Clarksdale this morning with Gram and got a new sweater and skirt. Then we bought groceries at Kroger. Got home around 11:30 and ate dinner." My question, of course, about the nature now of a public blog or twitter is, "Does anyone out there really care what we are doing or thinking?" My purpose in retirement for writing a blog is two-fold: keeping in touch with a small cadre of relatives and friends and writing about issues that I believe other retirees also care about.

We all know the society is moving away from print media rapidly, and there is major employee trauma about layouts in the publishing industry and the newspaper business. Perhaps blogs and twitters can somehow be preserved for future generations as a guide to what our society was like in 2009. I hope, however, that they will say more about our interior lives than our daily activities like mowing the yard.