Diablogism

It's summer.

I'm at the office less and at home more. I'm mowing, sanding furniture, fixing up the guest room, grilling pineapple-ginger pork chops. What I'm not doing is reading other blogs. At least, not much, and certainly not with the frequency or breadth I maintain during the school year.

No surprise there. What is a surprise, though, is how much my blog writing appears to depend on my blog reading. While last summer was my first full summer as a blogger, I spent it moving twice (once to Chicago for an interim home base, and then a second time to Ohio) and house-hunting, so blogging was virtually predestined to be very light. But now, with no such ado in my life, I still find myself posting relatively sporadically. It occurs to me that one reason, and likely the main one, is that I am not nearly as regular an inhabitant of the blogosphere as I would be normally. I don't mean to suggest that I only blog when I am directly reacting to a post by somebody else, though that is sometimes the case. Rather, I mean to say that, whether you believe in such a thing as thinking like a blogger or not, for me I have to be immersed in a thing--or, at least, this thing--to feel it (in the pop-metaphysical sense). That is, I have to read others' blogs to be able to truly inhabit my own.

I suspect the same is true for many, and probably most, bloggers. But I wonder how true it is. That is, I know my blogging is usuallty dependent on this pretty straightforward dialogism, but I wonder what other kinds and degrees of dialogism there may be and how they may inform different blogging practices (dare I say different blog-writing processes?).

Any thoughts?