What draws you to read someone’s autobiography? Personally, if I’m going to take time to read someone’s life story, they usually have to be someone of relative importance. I’m going to go ahead and assume this is how it is for most people. There’s really no draw for us as readers to read things about people we don’t know or care about.
Essentially personal blogs are shorter, day-to-day updates of someone’s life story, their autobiography.
It seems the world has become, well, fascinated with the personal blogs of everyday people, some they know and some they don’t. So what makes personal blogs about people we don’t know so much more fascinating than autobiographies about people we don’t know?
First off, I’m sure the length of the piece plays a large factor in our willingness to spend time reading about somebody else’s life. I’m much more inclined to read a few paragraphs about someone’s day than I am to read 200+ pages in a book.
Second, and probably most importantly, it is easier for us to connect to ordinary people, like ourselves, than to somebody in the limelight.
As I’ve talked about before, we obsess over celebrities lives because in our own way we’re trying live out our long-lost yearnings to be the next George Clooney or Sandra Bullock. On the other end of the spectrum, we’re able to connect with the blog entries of everyday people because their everyday lives actually resemble ours.
And sometimes it makes life just a little bit easier knowing there are people out there like you.
This need to relate to people out there has driven our society to celebrisize people who aren’t…celebrities. But that’s another post for another time!
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