Probably the biggest problem with having a blog is the way it changes your day-to-day experience. Diaries are necessarily private — or should be, until enough people have died. And at the other end of the spectrum you have mainstream news, which — for most people anyways — is far from personal.

Blogs occupy an interesting middle ground, in that the vast majority are personal, even private: the average diarist can rely on a certain amount of apathy, trusting that, in the long run, only people he knows will be interested is his site. But the events are still recorded as "news" and served up for public consumption.

And this awareness of public consumption is what alters the blogger's perception of daily life. As a recent article at Spiked put it:

Sociologists such as Anthony Giddens describe this self-monitoring as 'reflexivity', with individuals dwelling on the tiniest aspects of their lives. 'At each moment, or at least at regular intervals, the individual is asked to conduct a self-interrogation in terms of what is happening', writes Giddens (7). This includes questions such as 'What am I doing? What am I feeling? How am I breathing?'.

Not to mention the most important question:
"Is this blog-worthy?"

(That article, incidentally, got me to stop obsessively scanning in old photos earlier this summer. I didn't go outside and enjoy life without reflection — since I started journaling as a teenager, that kind of knee-jerk fun has become increasingly difficult to find — but it did get me reading books again, and that's a start.)

I'd wager that disgust with this "reflexivity" is second only to laziness as a cause of abandoned weblogs. I often get fed up with being my own personal historian (which is part of the reason why not every Lawrence event gets a rundown here, thank god) and I'm sure it's the same for others.

Which is why I've opted for a photo-heavy treatment of Graham's birthday party, which I attended yesterday. You'll find that post below.