Metacognating Like a Fourth Grader, or: Oh, Man, Now I'm Blogging About Blogging

I used to help my niece study her spelling words.  This was the blind leading the blind, but it hardly mattered because she was in fourth grade and  studying words like "weather" and "your," which I have managed to master over the years. 

But then one day, for no reason at all, amidst a list of words as complex as "exit" and "chance," she came home with a word list that included "metacognition."

Metacognition, for those of you who don't have a PhD in cognitive theory, is, basically, thinking about thinking.

At first I thought that Ms. Mann, the teacher, was an idiot.  But it turns out that, in her fit of gigantic-word insanity, she actually kind of knew what she was doing.  Neither my niece nor I will ever forget either the meaning or spelling of the word.

And metacognition has proven itself to be a surprisingly useful and fun word to know, despite it's seemingly tautological definition.

Writers often write about writing, which is a form of metacognition AND proof of our willingness to expand our egos to ever larger dimensions.  I like to blog about writing, which is a practice that can be described mathematically like this:

(Ego)(Ego), or Ego^2

(Not to be confused with Freud's Super-ego, which, despite the DC Comics language, is the moralizing part of the self that strives to act in a socially appropriate manner.  Writers can be expected to have an underdeveloped Super-ego.)

"Blog" is both noun and verb.  This is a blog, and on it, I blog.  "To blog," then, is something distinct from "to write" or "to journal" (the former being one of the more annoying and clunky noun-turned-verbs in the English language).

So if blogging is something different from writing or journaling, then what is it?  Certainly it usually includes writing and can include journaling.  It can also, as everyone who has ever seen a "family" blog knows, include bragging and self-congratulating. 

My favorite blogs are the ones that are least like personal diaries.  I like to think that we writers are capable of at least pretending that our audiences are forefront in our minds, and published diary entries tend to imply the opposite. 

Plus, they're rarely funny.

The thing about blogging that makes it fundamentally different and new is that it includes publishing.  Granted, we're not talking about publishing in any kind of traditional sense--"publishing," in the blogging world, does not include paper, editors, or even, in many cases, readers, but there is something to be said for finishing an entry by hitting "publish post."

Commentators seem to agree that blogging, like reality television, has turned us all into self-obsessed caricatures of ourselves.  We are, the argument goes, spending so much time creating and managing our public identities that none of us are paying any attention to anyone else's public identity.

I think the commentators are sour grapes because we're paying less attention to their public identities. 

The new iPhone is making news because it has two cameras--one whose lens is aimed outward, at the world, and one whose lens is directed inward, at the phone's owner.  Now, when we take pictures of ourselves, we can see the image as we take it, instead of flipping the screen around after snapping the shot to make sure we haven't taken a picture of the tree behind us by accident.

Traditional publishing aims the lens out to the world.  Journaling directs the lens at ourselves.  Blogging, for better or worse, is both.