Can I ask you all something in complete seriousness? Do you REALLY think that Mark is more suave than I am? I mean, really?
Jason has been talking about the difficulties in writing about personal things on the web. This seems to be quite the crisis for the young weblogging intelligensia at the moment. The first stage of the barbelith weblog ended with an e-mail from my brother promising not to tell my mother, the second stage when I realised that my co-workers were occasionally glancing at the site. Mark at Riothero has this problem as well. He used to compensate for it by having a password protected weblog, but then his family demanded that he allowed them to see it. And now there is something on Jason’s mind and he doesn’t know how to express it. Moreover he doesn’t know if he should:
“Why don’t I just write it down somewhere private…a Word doc on my computer or in a paper diary? Somehow, that seems strange to me though. For a lot of the personal Web publishing crowd, the Web is the place for you to express your thoughts and feelings and such. To put those things elsewhere seems absurd. Or is it just me?”
The answer seems pretty obvious to me – the mild anonymity of the net allows us to talk about whatever we want – get support from people without having to expose ourselves in person and transform our lives into (mostly) interesting narratives. I used to run this site called Blank Faeces which was all about our ability to explore aspects of ourselves online that we couldn’t do in everyday life. I think the sin of the weblogger or web celebrity is their (our?) compulsion to attach a name to the writings…