I've only relatively recently checked out the whole blogging thing: I never really saw the need or understood its purpose, at least fully. But then, it's only recently that I've investigated the social networking scene, too. In both instances, my assumptions have been proven wrong, on many levels, by many people. Social networking can be used for purposes other than being a glorified communal / public text / email centre for school kids to compare notes on the exchanges made while having a crafty fag behind the bike sheds or getting pissed round at Kelly's house on Friday night while her parents are away. Similarly a lot of blogs have surprised me, being well-written and well-considered, informed pieces of writing.

But then I've also encountered an awful lot of outpourings that have confirmed and even surpassed my worst fears. We live in a solipsistic egocentric age. Yes, it's the MYSpace generation. And it's MY space, and I'LL put whatever the hell I like on it. Fine. I'm all for freedom of expression, even when it's poorly expressed, uninformed bilge. But really, the centre of the universe must be a very crowded place.

I blame the parents - the ones who never discipline their children, because they're too special and precious and they're only expressing themselves, etc., while chugging the contents of the drinks cabinet and setting fire to the sheepskin rug at the age of seven. I blame the media: it's all about you... you're worth it. And so on. You'd have thought the emo kids would have a little more empathy, being in touch with their emotions and all. But no.

They're only in touch with their own wants (which they mistake for needs... they need an iPod, they need to go to McDonald's with their friends and hang around outside with their underpants on display while chowing on some ground-up carcass of an animal that was reared on land that was rainforest not so long ago). Selfishness? Well there's nothing wrong with that, it's what makes the you different... It's a tough world and if you don't stand up for yourself, then you'll get trampled on, need to get ahead in life, put yourself first. And so on.

But really, without dropping in a swathe of quotations to illustrate my point, suffice it to say that I for one feel quite uncomfortable reading in such detail about people's break-ups, their feuds, their long-running feuds with exes. I'm not saying that the personal can't be universal, and can appreciate unreservedly how, say, the blog of a cancer sufferer can be empowering and cathartic for both the writer and the readers, especially those in the same kind of situation. But that takes us back to the well-written blogs.

Such blogs transcend the mundane, and serve a real social purpose. This is one of the medium's great strengths: it has immediacy. Moreover, it connects the writer and their audience directly. But a good blogger writes the personal with an awareness of the universal. The bad blogger can't see beyond the end of their own nose and gives names and details that fall to meaningless due to a lack of explanation or context, instead focusing on the minutiae of he said / she said etc. and oh, the self-pity!

Believe it or not, I was a teenager once. I was prone to maudlin bouts, black holes of despair that would manifest themselves "artistically." Most of it was, naturally, bilge. Easy to say with hindsight, perhaps, but the difference between my scribblings - and those of countless others for decades, centuries, millennia - and those of the MeMeMeSpace generation is that they remained private.

Yes, we were embarrassed. A particularly cringeworthy diary entry would be torn out, shredded and burned the next morning, and no-one was any the wiser. Now, half the world's read about it by the time one wakes up, and I'm not entirely sure who's the more awkward and embarrassed, the writer or the reader. Certainly, as a reader I often feel I've overstepped the mark, and that I'm not gaining an insight into someone's life in a way that I can apply in a universal context, so much as stumbled into someone else's therapy session and been signaled to pull up a chair.

If there is a point to all this, or a lesson to be learned, it's probably this: think before you type and click to submit.