First post (second attempt)

I've been having some trouble with this blogging idea. Why am I writing it? Who's reading it?

I wrote the following post, then had a change of heart, and deleted not only it but the whole blog. The idea that I was on the verge of displaying my soul to an anonymous audience frankly terrified me. Then decided I was being a coward, and now I'm reinstating it with this brief preface.

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Earlier today I found myself skulking in the biography section of Borders, flicking surreptitiously through celebrity autobiographies in an attempt to locate the sexy bits.

I admit to this with some shame, of course. Other books, challenging ones, books which are intelligent, bold, subversive even, are being pushed off the bestseller shelves by precisely these sorts of marketing ploys. Purchase the ghost-written memoirs of tabloid favourite [insert celebrity of the week here] and buy your access to the few salacious details not already published in Heat.

But why this fascination with the most meagre of scandalous celebrity titbits (no pun intended)? Why is it that the intimate anecdotes of Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood (or whoever) have such a magnetic hold over so many? I mean, honestly! What feeds this incessant, insatiable appetite for the very last scraps of the private lives of the rich and famous?

The odd thing is that however intimate the revelations, they never seem to be quite secret enough. As the most personal information becomes ever-more accessible (whether through the glossy pages of the gossip press or the virtual pages of social networking sites), it becomes cheapened; its elusive value becomes all the more apparent. We want to know people: to crack through those neat little packages of identity we make for ourselves in which even our most personal experiences are commodities to be traded as truth-or-dare Top Trumps or listed under ‘Info’ on facebook. We want to see our fellow human beings laid bare, and the more they strip, the barer we want them. There’s no disguise like nudity.

So where does blogging fit into all this? Until very recently, I’d assumed it was merely part of the same package. ‘Hello world: here I am, in easily-digested form! Now notice me!’ Indeed, at first glance, a blog like The Virginity Project is participating in the very same activity as the celeb memoirs and the gossip magazines: ‘Details! More details! And more!’

But of course that’s not quite it. These details aren’t commodified. Blogs don’t exploit that fundamental need for human contact for seedily commercial ends. Nor do these details have to be reduced to vox-pop nuggets.

And it’s not straightforward. In the digital age, we exist to a very great extent in the coded ones and zeros of our mobile phones and facebook pages just as much as we do in ‘real’ life (‘meatspace’, as second-lifers so charmingly call it). By writing this first blog posting, I am in a very real sense ‘creating’ myself: what voice should I adopt? what level of ironic distance? How can I translate that indefinable something that is essentially ‘me’ into words on a screen? A good friend told me recently that in writing as in conversation, I lapse frequently into cliché, falling back on pre-packaged, pre-formulated turns of phrase. How can I ever hope to make contact through this medium, cutting no corners?

Well, I don’t know.

But I hope I can start to find out.