An Insider’s Take on an

Outsider’s Take on Blogging

I’ve come across an interesting critique of blogging. It was written by a friend of mine. I think the analysis is pretty accurate and interesting and worth reading.

I should point out that I think it’s applicable only to blogs in which an author discusses his or her personal life. There are plenty of blogs out there that deal only with current events, or media happenings, or linkage, or whatever, and reveal next to nothing about what’s going on in the author’s life.

And yet there are low entry costs to blogging. Go to Blogger and you can set one up in minutes. Those low entry costs encourage a wide selection of people to create blogs. Anyone can do one. And most people like to write about what they know. And the things that most people are most informed about are their own lives. So a majority of blogs probably do serve primarily as personal diaries.

The piece raises several issues I’ve thought about before.

“Blogging sets up an incentive to create and overanalyze issues.”

I happen to know that that that sentence was prompted, at least in part, by some of my recent entries. So I’d like to comment.

I’m not quite sure the statement is true, at least not with respect to me. I don’t create and overanalyze issues because I blog; I blog because I create and overanalyze issues. If I didn’t blog, I would still create and overanalyze issues. It’s just that the blog gives me a public forum in which to do so.

But on the other hand… hmmm. Publish or perish, right? We all like having readers. And the best way to draw more eyeballs (and, more importantly, to keep those eyeballs) is by making sure your blog becomes a habitual read, which you do by updating your blog regularly. And this creates pressure to write — even when I may not have anything exciting to say. And it’s possible that in recounting my day in a way that makes it accessible to my audience, I’ll come up with things I hadn’t thought about. And that I’ll write about those things.

But is that bad? Well:

“I believe these ruminations ultimately do the primary author a dis-service. I’m all for analysis. But sometimes it’s good to stop and let the world go by. I would argue that a number of bloggers get so caught up in the very practice of blogging that they prevent themselves from enjoying any one day too much… I often wonder how paths would change if a compulsive blogger simply took a vacation for awhile.”

Okay. As a compulsive blogger, I think that’s a valid point. Again, though — if I weren’t writing about these thoughts, I’d still be thinking them. At least with a blog I’m exposed to some alternative viewpoints instead of thinking my thoughts in a echo chamber.

Also, I get to meet new people.

I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. Sometimes I try to remember what things were like before my life had a glass wall (or a translucent one, anyway). I like the interaction it’s brought me, though. So I’ll keep doing it.

Here’s a great issue:

“What happens when bloggers do things with people in real life, especially those who don’t blog but nonetheless know the blog exists? What happens is that the outsider starts reading about him or herself on a Web site. Social engagements become akin to those anxious meetings with journalists—you’re never sure what exactly will be on or off the record.”

Excellent point, one I’ve worried about. If I meet someone who reads my blog, will that reader feel inhibited when we hang out? If the reader starts to worry about being written about, that could get in the way of natural human interactions.

And it causes problems not only for the written-about reader, but for the writer, too.

It’s something I didn’t think about until I started meeting some of my readers. Until then, the barriers between blog and life were relatively watertight. When I started to meet my readers, I needed to create rules.

I’ve made it a practice not to write too much about the readers I’ve met. I once met one of my readers and thought he was totally cute, but I didn’t write about it here, because I was afraid of what he’d think if he knew.

(And yet, I haven’t heard from him since I first met him. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to read about himself here.)

Also, I rarely use a person’s real name here — reader or otherwise — unless the person is a fellow blogger, or unless it would be pointless to protect the person’s identity. For example, Mike and I know some of the same people, and he’s already used their real names, so there’s really no more identity-protecting I can do there.

In general, though, I try to avoid embarrassing a reader. I try not to reveal something that the reader wouldn’t want other people to know. If I had sex with a reader, I don’t think I’d write about it here.

This non-embarrassment clause also applies to people I interact with through e-mail or Instant Messenger or whatever.

Blogging is a power. It is a power that must be used wisely. It is a power that can fall into the wrong hands. (Cue “Lord of the Rings” theme music here.)

It is a power that can be used as a cop-out. If you want one of your readers to know something, and it would be embarrassing or awkward to tell that thing to the person directly, it could be tempting to tell the person by writing about it in your blog instead.

That isn’t something I’ve done yet — I don’t think. But it’s certainly possible. Because it’s easier.

And of course, there’s another danger in blogging — an obvious danger. A danger you can’t protect against. It’s the danger that someone in your life reads your blog regularly — and you, the writer, don’t know it.

Yikes.

And there’s a paradox inherent in quasi-anonymous personal blogging, too. On the one hand, I like getting more readers. On the other hand, I get nervous that some of those new readers will be people who I don’t want reading my blog: employers, parents, elderly relatives, or people who are mentioned here. For instance, when I agreed to be interviewed for an AP article about blogging a few months ago, I was thrilled by the possibility that it could bring in more readers. But it didn’t — and now, because of that article, you can find my blog by typing my name into Google. That was a big mistake on my part.

We bloggers — those of us who write about our personal lives, anyway — often adhere to the fiction that our blogs are unconnected to the real world, that what we write about doesn’t affect anything outside the blogging universe, that we can write whatever we want, that we don’t have to worry about how our words might affect others.

It’s important to remember that the walls are not watertight, that we don’t live in a parallel universe.

Only in a postmodern one.