Why start a blog

Sometimes when I am sending someone an email, the truth is that the heart of my impulse is that:

1. there is something that I have discovered or observed and want to express; and
2. among everyone I know whom I feel free to write to, the person to whom I am writing feels to me the most receptive.

That's when the trouble begins. Well actually, it's already begun, because there is a good chance that person was not really that interested in getting that message at that time.

I notice a dynamic controlling people's response to this kind of email.

1. It turns out that the more passionate I am about whatever it was I laid on my poor friend, the less likely will he be to respond.
2. Of course the more fully I develop the idea, the more ponderous it is to the other.
3. The more citations I include in the form of links, well that makes it even more ponderous.
4. The more frequently I do this, well that pretty much squelches any possibility of getting a reply. It seems a likely conclusion on the part of the recipient of my unburdenings that if they reply they're more likely to get even more of this kind of stuff.
5. And of course, the more recipients, the less impelled any one person will be to answer.

So the way the equation goes, to the extent that something is important to me, the less likely I am to get any kind of response. And there's something about the vacuum of interstellar space that's disconcerting. I have no way of knowing, for example, whether a communication is so cryptic or abstruse as to be impenetrable, or whether it is self-evident, by virtue of either verbosity, or the subject's being old hat to the other person to begin with.

With blogging, the structure of the interaction seems to be better fitted than email, in that it is the reader who decides to show up, and not the writer who decides who wants to read what he or she has written.