The Blog as a Construction and Reconstruction of Identity

Our identities are necessary illusions – we never stop attempting to patch them up and to provide them with some plausibility but they are always threatening to fall into dereliction and to explode with unresolved contradictions.

John Mepham, Virginia Woolf: A Literary Life

Though I have never maintained a blog, I read a lot of blogs. And somehow after reading a particular blog, I get a sense of familiarity with the blogger. I cannot help creating patches of the blogger’s identity upon reading his or her random thoughts online. But in a world which acknowledges the existence of a fake blog and a fictionalized real blog, I should know that the identity and personality of the blogger can never be fully established.

Still on another level, even the blogger himself or herself should know that he or she cannot fully claim that the blog is the embodiment of herself or himself. He or she must take note that the self is constantly in flux such that the moment the blog is created narrating how he or she feels or thinks, he or she already feels or thinks differently consciously or unconsciously.

But for all its creative attempts to establish the self, the blog remains an efficient medium.

Therefore, even if the blog is considered as a faddish literary form, the blogger may get a momentary chance through this medium of establishing the self and getting fulfillment in the process. And for all the blogs I have read and the blogggers I have known, this is really evident.