The Problem With Blogging

Doyce wrote a long post, well worth reading, that touches on the main "problems" with blogging. I could totally go through his list and tick off my agreement with many of the comments he cites, and share my own experiences.

Like that one time I was put in the middle of a fight with a group of friends, and I blogged that I wish people who had problems with other people would just talk to THEM about it, and not drag me into the middle, and how because of that, I'm no longer talking to half those people?

Or about my rants and raves about work, most of which I shuffled off into fictional form on a novel, but certainly some of which made it into blog form, though I never used names, at least as far as I recall?

Or my overblown emotional outpourings of affection for my fake internet boyfriend, who ending up decidedly not boyfriendly?

Or the fact that when I did become involved in a real relationship, I recognized that I didn't want our friends and families to experience every minute detail of it, and that there were somethings best kept private?

Or that we are all, easily, googlible, and people you've never met before are able to make the connection between your personal, perhaps anonymous blog and your true self?

Or how even some of the links and non-personal articles I post about reveal nothing more than an aspect of my blogger persona, pithy and witty as I hope it may be.

So, right, where was I? Oh yeah, the problem with blogging.

Bottom line: it's not private. I know I don't always think as carefully as I should about how what I might say here, or in a comment on another blog, or on some other forum, under some other name, might get back to me. I hope I don't have this deep, dark, mean core at the center of me, that makes "mistakes" sometimes, deliberately hurting people I care about with the words I choose. I really, really hope I don't. Most days, I try to be nice, Snarky, sure, but that's a kind of love.

For me, there's another level as well, where I'm using this blog professionally, to a degree, while deliberately keeping it away from professional contacts in (one of) my chosen fields. It's a sort of Rubik's Cube, or Mobius Strip, how I try sometimes to keep one side of my life from the other, and other times, dangle dangerously close to all of them colliding. So I can call this my "personal" blog, but I'm not about to post any mean, biting comments about someone I met recently. There are things I talk to my best friend about, and neither one of us post them on our blogs.

Doyce quoted a common problem with blogging, "I hate having to edit myself on my blog. It's MY blog." And yet, aren't we ALWAYS editing ourselves? Think of the words you'd use with your friends that you'd never say in front of your parents, the conversation you have with your sister that you'd never have with your boss -- now imagine every person that COULD be reading your blog, or listening in to your conversation, lurking over your shoulder. If you don't want them to hear, don't say it.

Because the other thing about blogs, or LiveJournals, or MySpace pages -- which I think Doyce touched on briefly, but it bears repeating -- they can live foreverrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. When you win that Oscar, or write that bestseller, or raise that amazing kid and let him have a computer of his own... they can find you.

Yeeks. When I put it that way, I better go look at my archives. I think I use the word "Woot!" way too much for a respectable literary agent.