during our conversation, i observed that if someone were stupid enough to post attack blogs about CW, he or she would instantly become a pariah, b/c CW has always been to me one of soulcast’s most courageous bloggers: she blogs from her heart and makes herself vulnerable. and she goes right on doing it, day in, day out. people would stop reading the idiot and simply ignore him/her/it.
but what particularly spurred me to write this installment in the series was a blog entry by bronx. or to be more specific, a few paragraphs towards the end of the article to which he linked.
the BBC article quoth:
and if people start writing poetry about themselves in their out of office messages, it could be because people are less self-conscious in e-mails than they would be in real life.
without any of the usual social cues from a conversation, such as body language and tone of voice, e-mailers lose their embarrassment radar, suggests carolyn axtell of the institute of work psychology at the university of sheffield. “they can lose their inhibitions and become less concerned about how they will be evaluated. so people might say things on e-mail that they might not otherwise say.”
this explains why people get so aggressive in e-mails, she says, and also why e-mails, blogs and networking websites are so full of “self-disclosure”– and how people are willing to tell strangers their whereabouts on an out of office message.
while i don’t use this space to talk about myself very much, i’m in the minority that way: most soulcasters do, revealing some intensely personal things about themselves. and i admire that about you guys. it takes courage to say these things about yourselves.
in another of my online haunts, a friend finally recognized that he has a bias against a certain group. he posted a discussion thread confessing it, and you know something? he gained more of my respect for having the stones to see it and admit it. that too took courage.
the act of blogging involves pouring out some measure of who you are into something that not just your friends, but complete strangers will read. we blog for ourselves: there’s something within us that needs to get out.
so when i see some of my favorite people leaving SC for having been vulnerable and being burned by it, that both angers and perplexes me. it angers me b/c that means good people are being driven off by bottom-dwellers, and it perplexes me b/c i fear it means that people are losing sight of the fact that once you commit something to the internet, you..commit something to the internet.
i prefer to think that people make themselves vulnerable here b/c they know that’s what they’re doing, and know the full ramifications. i recently became aware that isn’t true in at least one case i know of and that saddens me.
so how courageous are you about how you blog here? are you tightly-zipped up, never saying anything personal or revealing? or do you let it allhang out? maybe you walk some line in the middle? or haven’t you considered the prospect that what is said on SC can be read by anyone and everyone that has an internet connection? comment and let me know.
ed
