Hello.
I’m Tom, Emily’s boyfriend. I wanted a soapbox to write about something, so have borrowed Emily’s blog for the night.
This afternoon I read “Over-sharing 2.0: the rise of the couple bloggers” on the Guardian website.
It features Sally and Ross who run Louder Than Silence.
The basic premise of the article is that there’s been a trend of ‘perfect’ couples that blog and that they’re all slightly nauseating.
I don’t agree, but I understand. If you’re had a bad relationship or your job’s not going well, then reading about how wonderful someone else’s life is, isn’t going to make you feel great. Some people like happy music others like death metal.
The comments though seem completely disproportionate and unnecessarily hateful! I’m sure lots of it’s just trolling, people having fun by goading others, but some of it is more sinister.
The basic accusation seems to that people only blog out of narcissism or some deep rooted psychological impairment.
Someone ridiculously claimed that this type of ‘consumerist’ blog was the root cause of last weeks riots!
This plainly wrong. Blogging, lifestyle or otherwise, is a completely legitimate pastime like any other.
Blogging provides an incredible creative outlet. It motivates you to take pictures, improve your writing and even encourages you to do more.
Emily and I started out by taking photos of our cuddly toy fox and polar bear because we wanted to get better at photography. We started for ourselves, but kept at it because it turned out other people enjoyed it too. It’s not vanity to enjoy getting feedback but it is motivating.
Emily started this blog because she started to follow more and more fashion, cooking and lifestyle blogs and wanted to take part.
The communities are the best thing about blogging. On the internet you find collections of people that could never have existed before. Whatever your niche you’ll find amazing, charismatic people to interact with.
Sally and Ross are lovely, and so are the other dozen people we’ve met up with through our blogs.
We absolutely love blogging. We’ll never feel guilty for doing it.
If you don’t like it, don’t read it! That’s the beauty of the internet. You can tailor it to what you want.
I’m quite looking forward to the final demise of newspapers.
