The Balance of Blogs, Opinion piece

I've been charmed by the idea of blogs since 2010, when my friend start showing me a blog she followed, and eventually hooked me into finding more blogs to follow. I regularly check Bloglovin’ now, an app which makes it relatively easy to follow various blogs at the one time, and I enjoy scrolling through, perusing for the most interesting article or images to look at, read and explore.

However I was intrigued by a few posts I had read recently by long time bloggers, about their opinion on the direction blogging has taken over the last few years, and as I reader more than a writer, it perked my interest and sent me down a path of reflection on what I enjoyed from blogs, and what I thought was perhaps lacking in a few that I had followed/ am currently following.

This is not a shaming of any blogs, I am not here to pass judgement on whatever way people want to blog or live their lives but I am sharing my opinion on what I look for in a blog, which is a balance of elements.  The first element that draws me to a blog is the content, of course. I am a person interested in a myriad of topics, but what I want from my blog reading (opposed to my enjoyment of reading more journalistic articles and novels) is that I want a glimpse to a life that is creative and appealing to me- people who are nerdy/passionate about their love for crafting, collecting, fashion, travelling and all of their hobbies. Whether it’s through photographs or their writing, it’s the enthusiasm and excitement people have for their interests that really makes me enjoy following along on their lives and journeys.

With that being said the balance that I crave from the content which I am reading is between authenticity and idealism. We live in a world where “perfection” is shown to us through every media campaign and now through every planned photograph on social media and blog post. However I do not think that planned, thought out images are something to necessarily discourage. A lot of images are treated as piece of art and the art form of photograph can be beautiful. I'm no expert in photography and design, but I appreciate the composition of some images and I don’t believe that it is wrong to make an image that isn't totally realistic, but more idealistic. Idealism is something that we strive for but need to acknowledge that is not realistic, that we are human and so we are not perfect. This is where authenticity comes in. When social media and blogs and magazines and advertisements are flooded with idealistic images, we can fool ourselves into thinking that this is the truth and that people can live simply perfect lives all the time. I admit that I am guilty, as many of us are, of posting photos online that are more idealistic views of my life rather than the ordinary, mundane, imperfect view that I could be sharing. Taking a slight meander from blogging itself, it is interesting that different social media sites promote different levels of idealism from their participants and from their own function: I joined Instagram in the last year and obviously the style and content of it is very different from the likes of Snapchat! However I enjoy both of them: Snapchat for personal, realistic, spontaneous moments and Instagram for images that I can create and design to make appeal to my artistic and creative side. There was a good point highlighted in an article I read recently that it is very important on all sharing platform to show the genuine side every now and again, a non-posed side of life, which in itself is an art form and allows the readers to see the human side of things, to distinguish with between idealism and reality.

This is what I want form the blogs that I read: I want to know about the person’s life (to a degree, obviously this is their platform for creativity and they need their privacy and their right to share as much or little of their personal life as they want) in relation to the theme or topic of their blog, and I want to see what they create and think, but from both perspectives. There has been a lot of popularity brought to blogs/vlogs over the last five years and the blogging style has changed to meet that. Again, this is not something I object to or discourage as I think that’s it’s wonderful that so many people can make their livelihood from it. However, with the almost universal change in style, to a more clean –cut, branded style of blogging, I feel there has been some authenticity lost, as many blogs now look, write and create the same things in the same style. I've discarded and moved away from a lot of blogs that were on my reading list as their content didn't feel as fresh or homily as it once did.

This is not a plea to bloggers out there: “go back to your roots, go back to your kitschy way of lives!” because most blogs are a documentation of the blogger’s progression in life, and they have changed their lives and moved on from the point in which I initially started reading, why should revert themselves to an older version of themselves? This is my opinion on what really makes a good blog for me, a person who is unafraid to talk/show things that are real and imperfect and yet also include beautiful, inspiring thoughts and pieces, who love their own style and interests and share them in a well-designed layout that appeals to me.

Often I have toyed with the idea of starting my own blog (i.e. this one), but have struggle with what theme/content I wished to share as I'm very aware of my own privacy and yet being able to share with other people my interests and passions. Another level of the blogging process that I have struggled with is the level of effort and design I want to put into the content. By reflecting on the balance of elements of blogs, I've come to a place where I know what I love about them and what I want from them and would like to extend that to my own writing. While it can be wonderful to engage and appease the audience of a blog, a blog is your own and if it is intended as a personal platform than it should appease yourself first and the reader second.  I would like to explore blogging from the writer’s perspective and see if I come out with the same conclusions as I did when I wrote this piece.

Only time will tell, and hopefully I can write more regularly and enjoy creating and writing posts for this blog, that others may enjoy (that means you, whoever you are!)

Bye for now, A.

Some articles that sparked my train of thought if you're interested:

From accooohtrements

From Delightfully Tacky

From D E S I G N L O V E F E S T