Obligation to an audience

I have several friends who have their own personal blogs. They each keep it for different reasons, but several of them use it mainly for updating people on their life, telling interesting stories, or sharing new discoveries or deal offers. Depending on the person depends on how often they blog or how long their blogs are, but it seems that people become dependent on these blogs. One of my friends is a regular blogger and usually updates her page at least once a week, if not more. She is a really good writer and a great photographer. She shares stories and pictures that are awesome and tend to brighten my day a bit when I see or read them. Recently, she had not posted anything for a long length of time and I had started to wonder what was going on. Then, after an almost month long absence, she returned with a very simple post that was just a few short sentences, a beautiful picture of her daughter, and the title “I’m not dead”. There were several comments on this post that included many people saying how much they missed her. One comment included someone saying how excited they were to see her back and was expecting a long post with a full explanation about what had happened to her, and she was disappointed that there was not more to the post.

This whole thing made me start to wonder about the obligation that a blogger had to their audience. Blogging tends to be a very informal way of sharing stories or ideas, but I had not thought about them as being of any importance. To me, blogging has just been a way that any joe-shmo can put their thoughts out there for the rest of the world to see; it’s another way that people who want to be heard can yell some more. However, after considering this experience and numerous discussions about blogs, I can see that there can be much more to it. Just something interesting to think about I guess…