Blogs vs. good memory
Once in a while I come across someone who says that blogging (or any other form of diary) is useless to him/her because of his/hers good memory. This argument sounds somewhat funny to me. You see, I thought that my memory was good too. I could remember all important things in my life and trace them back to, well, as far as I could remember.
That was before I started to blog. Now I have close to 3,000 posts that constantly remind me how bad my memory is and how easy it is to forget those little precious moments in life.
I still try to remember as much as I can. But I don’t rely on my memory as much as I used to, because it was proven to be rather faulty. Instead I blog about things that are important to me, or things that can remind me of important things that I want to remember. So far it works very good.
Also, since I mentioned it – indirect blogging works for me very well too. There are some things that I don’t want the public to know, but that I don’t want to forget either. I tried using private posts for these, but it just wasn’t fun. So, instead, I switched to indirect blogging. That is I write about private and secret things in public, but I do so in such a way that only I can figure out the second meaning. (Hint: if you come across a post that makes no sense at all, maybe it’s just one of those indirect posts that I wrote for myself.)
November 23rd, 2005 at 4:57 pm
well, your memory better serve you for the indirect posts… ;-)
Well for me what happens is apart from reminding me of things, I also find it very surprising, at times astonishing – to read what I’ve written years ago. But only after I’ve forgotten about having written, to read before forgetting it is usually kind of boring :-) Sometimes I’m pleasantly surprised – “wow how did I manage to write all that” and sometimes I wonder “hmm can’t believe I said that – I really needed to grow up a lot!”
As for private posts, you probably know this already but you might also consider using the viewlevel plugin.
November 25th, 2005 at 9:33 am
Sanjay,
Thanks for the link to the plugin. Looks interesting! I’ll check it out.
The forgetting part is so true too – I also like to go back and read random entries just to see what I was up to. And my reactions are similar to yours – from “What an idiot!” to “Wow! This guy is cool!” :)