Identity Crisis?

I’m writing this blog with a question, or something that keeps me thinking. So it’s personal, but apparently I want to share it with others anyway.

And that is the thing, where I’m thinking about. This paradox. Why are people ‘blogging’? Is a blog simply an online diary? I don’t think so. Of course, they have some functionalities in common like self-expression and creating order out of chaos. But in my opinion blogging is nowadays more about self-presentation.

This becomes clear when you look at the millions of fashion blogs written by girls. The pictures seem to say: ‘look, this is what I’m wearing, THIS IS ME’! However, is this a real image? Girls at their best, beautiful-looking with gorgeous clothes, smiling at the camera? I think that many bloggers are showing an improved version of themselves. And this is the main difference with a diary, where you can actually write about doubts, weaknesses, fears and insecurities. The private-public separation means probably a real-unreal separation.

But why are it girls/women who are mainly blogging (at least the blogs in which self-presentation is central)? And why do they all seem to look so similar? I have absolutely nothing against the fashion blog itself. It can be a way to express creativity, showing the world unique work and to inspire others. Some of them do this particularly well! But I think that this self-presentative fashion-blogging is for a lot of girls more a kind of search for identity. The fact that many fashion blogs look like each other and that these self-presentations are far from real, shows that this identity is maybe hard to find. A new kind of idealized image seems to prevail on the internet, where boys/men do not seem to suffer that much from. And many girls seem thereby to be trapped in this fashion-blog-culture.