It seems not everyone has had the same experience of meeting blog people that I have. On her own blog, ac goes into more detail about why this might be so. She writes:
I have an impression that blogging can be a bit bad for the character, if it makes you more self-involved and grandiose, and for that reason you should try to be more separate from your online self. I may notice this particularly because I seem to have the opposite problem, where my writing tends to tap into an older, more insecure strain of character. Either way, I think the distinction between the writing self and the everyday self should be maintained, or at least recognized.
I don’t disagree, exactly, but I do find this a difficult point of view to understand. On the one hand, sure. To the extent that blogging leads to delusions of grandeur or whatever, keeping clear the distinction between one’s everyday self and one’s online persona is probably a good thing. But I just have a hard time seeing that as a serious risk, at least for the kind of blogging I’m familiar with. It’s certainly true that my blog persona is different from the persona I present to the world most of the time (for one thing, I’m very quiet and shy in person and I don’t think that comes across as much online); in a lot of ways I think it’s closer to the way I perceive myself. I can see how that could be problematic if taken to extremes, but I don’t really see how the blog medium would bear responsibility if that happened. Surely the same thing could happen from, say, moving to a new place with a different social structure.
In an update, ac continues:
Someone else once pointed out to me that the internet creates a false and somewhat frustrating sense of intimacy, because revelation is usually earned in real life, and there is more mutual exchange and influence, whereas the mechanisms of social relation are speeded up, and potentially more one-sided, online. I have made some great friends through the medium, but I remain wary of it.
Now this I can understand, and indeed I’ve felt this way myself from time to time. I’ve revealed a lot about myself online that I’ve kept from most people I know in real life, which makes for some rather odd relationships with people whom I’ve never met in person but who know a lot of personal things about me. And when I do meet those people in person, the dynamics can be significantly different from the way I interact with most people I know. That said, I’m not as wary of the medium as ac is. I can’t even express what an enormous force for good in my life blogging has been. I’ve always been a shy, solitary person, tending to loneliness, and discovering a community that, for all its limitations, is always there and willing to accept me has been such a help to me that I don’t know what I would have done without it.
But enough of the misty-eye treatment. What interests me here is the really quite different attitudes toward blogging that ac and I have. From the way she’s phrased her post, and other things she’s written, it’s clear that she considers her blogging persona closely connected to her identity as a writer, to the extent that it taps into issues and vulnerabilities that aren’t necessarily important in her everyday life. In fact, she seems to consider blogging primarily as a medium within which she is an author, much like fiction (which she also writes). From that perspective, I can see how the differences between author-function and actual person become very important; all authors have personae distinct from their personalities, and neglecting to maintain the distinction can cause serious problems in an author’s life. It’s a very literary approach to the medium, which makes perfect sense for someone who moves in very literary circles both online and off.
I’m not like that at all, however. I came to the blogosphere via political and academic blogs, and although I no longer frequent many of those, my attitude toward the medium has largely been shaped by a different approach to writing, one in which the blogger is not an author, conveying their thoughts through carefully-rendered, aesthetically-pleasing arrangements of words, but merely a writer, doing the drudgework necessary to communicate their ideas and observations. These aren’t hard-and-fast categories, of course; the thoughts of an author are just as important as the words used to express them, and even a mere writer is concerned with sounding nice. It’s not the results or even the process that differs between the two but rather the overall abstract understanding of the enterprise.
Basically, I don’t like writing. I find it difficult and unpleasant. I do it because I think some of the things I have to say are worth the effort. I do it for school because that’s what you have to do in school, and I’ll do it for my job (whatever that ends up being) because it will almost certainly be a big part of what I have to do, but I don’t enjoy it. I don’t aspire to the life of staying at home and writing all day, because I know I would hate it. I don’t know for sure that others feel differently, but I think they probably do, and there sure are a lot of people out there writing novels; presumably they don’t all hate the process of doing that. My thesis in this post, such as it is, is that people who like to write are more likely to think of themselves as authors and approach blogging from a literary perspective, while those of us who don’t are more likely to think of ourselves as writers and approach the medium differently (though certainly not all in the same way).
I apologize if I’ve misinterpreted ac at all, which is a distinct possibility. Please correct me if I have, ac. Any other comments about this theory, which I haven’t really thought out very carefully, are welcome as well.
