Did you just buy a new tube of lipstick? Better yet, have you just potty-trained your 2-year-old? Did you just get married? Did you try your hand at painting that ugly table you found at Goodwill with chalkboard paint? If you answered yes to any of these, the obvious next step is to go blog about it—at least, that’s what the general consensus seems to be working toward.
I knew when a friend created a blog to chronicle her life as a newlywed that this was a more serious problem than I had initially suspected. Oversharing as a trend is in its prime; so many people are insisting that everyone must know everything about everyone. Privacy has become “so last season.”
The far-reaching, booming online world of blogging is a medium that has existed since the 1990s, but it has taken off exponentially since the first generation of social media users have become adults. We have travel, beauty, parent, fashion, personal, business, political, craft, “how-to” and book blogs, just to name a few. People can even be “career” bloggers. Those who garner enough views can be paid to review or promote products and get paid-for ad space. Others freelance for online sites about a variety of topics.
People are rewarded for high levels of narcissism; this has become a cultural phenomenon that correlates with the rise of intrusive reality television, social media and Kim Kardashian’s new “selfie” book. In recent years, the media has trained us to believe that people care about the mundane daily rituals we all undergo. The trials and tribulations of everyday life used to be kept to oneself, occasionally documented in a scrapbook to show family. Now, no one can truly escape constant status updates and incessant oversharing.
The most annoying of the bloggers are the “mommy” bloggers. They began as a group of mothers and housewives seeking camaraderie. The community has produced full-time jobs for some. These women are now gaining the credibility to provide vital parenting advice, perhaps wrongly so. These blogs can even become exploitative. For example, look at the detailed descriptions of their children’s potty-training debacles. It has become the new fad to utilize your children to create a career on the Internet.
The medium of blogging has become perverse. Blogs used to promote honesty and bolster the types of communities that the Internet allows. Now, with bloggers paid to promote products and give reviews, the sincerity blogging once represented is diminishing. So many blogs have just become money-fueled, PR platforms.
We’ve been reading for years that logging onto social media leads to depression and anxiety. Looking at the beautiful lives that our peers choose to display and filter can leave us feeling inadequate, and like we don’t quite measure up. Blogging, rather than creating a community of like-minded people, further pits us against one another. It seems like a competition about who has the best blog, the best ideas, the best values or even the best life.
With the current state of blogging, we see very little genuine insight. Most personal blogs are fanciful facades invented by the owner. We are allowing our Internet to be overrun with the fake, airbrushed lives of individuals. Blogging is just another symptom of a cultural inability to develop self-reliance and self-confidence. If this narcissistic sharing overload is ever done, perhaps we will all stop needing the constant validation of others.
