VITAMEDIAS
Blogs: Hanging dirty laundry on-line: Blogs feed the modern appetite for gossip, which seems to grow faster than even technology can feed it.
What urge is satisfied by this public confession of private tensions? The same satisfaction of the confessional itself: There is a relief in speaking a secret aloud. Indeed, there are several "confession" sites, where one can anonymously describe one's sins (usually under seven predictable categories). The important thing here is the idea that others can read them. The Internet affords an illusory sense of having made a public pronouncement. (These pronouncements are nominally public, since anybody can in theory read all of them, but in truth the authors can be pretty sure nobody will, unless they're personally involved.)
In fairy tales, protagonists with terrible secrets whisper them to the grass or to a hole in the ground. In the absence of such a poetic sensibility - and in the absence of actual priests - the Internet serves as a neutral receptor for yearnings and anger and confession: It is a cosmic ear.