ASSIGNMENT- Blog Comments

The blog that appealed to me the most from the provided list was http://www.myunfocusedlife.com/, which has been set up by Gregg Lebovitz, a forty nine year old writer currently living in Brighton, Massachusetts, USA. Many hyperlinks were included in this blog. The hyperlinks transfer you to Gregg’s complete profile, to ADD sites, to blogs Gregg has read and has found noteworthy, to various organizations and advertisements, and to a statistics page that records when and how many people visited this particular blog. Within My Unfocused Life there was a hyperlink to http://finearts.luther.edu/artists/beckcharles.html, and at the end of each entry the reader is given the opportunity to post a comment and to view other readers’ comments.
This blog may be placed under the genre of a journal and the reason it fascinated me is because while a journal is defined by an inherently personal and private nature, Lebovitz overrides this property by making it a conspicuously public expose of the intimate details of his life. Lebovitz’s personal rantings constitute a concrete example of how the boundaries of the I and we are dissolved via a blog; “a web application” that renders individual and private thoughts public events.
To some extent Lebovitz’s online journal mirrors reality TV shows in the sense that a multitude of people have the ability and the privilege to look into a person’s life, comment on it, become immersed in it (even develop a fixation with it), look down on it, and smoothly incorporate it into their day-to-day conversations and lives. Being the private person that I am, I doubt I would voluntarily post intimate details of my life on the web yet at the same time I must confess that I was rather intrigued by Lebovitz’s blog. I found his writing compelling, and even though his most recent entry had me thinking he was a cocky, ethnocentric man (note the title “American Men Rock”), by the time I had finished reading “A Rose by Any Other Name” I was impressed by his romantic, wise, and soul-reaching comments about love and his advice to those seeking for love.