Today a friend asked me the following question:
“Blogs are a very public way of revealing thoughts. Did/does it make you uncomfortable at times?”
A very good question. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the answer is non-trivial. The best analogy I can think of is with driving a car – a wonderfully efficient way to cause death, dismemberment and general public mayhem. When you drive, you have complete freedom at all times to kill yourself and others. All it takes is a simple turn of the wheel and you are toast.
And yet millions of people drive cars every day, for the most part without mishap. The only thing protecting them from certain death is their own highly developed sense of self-preservation.
Putting your thoughts and emotions out there in a blog is something like that. Theoretically at any moment you could say something that would inappropriately confuse public and private knowledge, betray a friend’s trust, or in some other way be the equivalent of pulling your pants down in public (with or without that second pair of pants underneath). And then of course there is always the danger of being found guilty of BWI (blogging while intoxicated).
So many perils.
And yet the moment you put your hands on that wheel, step on the accelarator and pull out into traffic, a wonderful thing happens. You realize that you really do value your life, a certain circle of privacy, the trust of your friends, the line between sane and insane. It is perfectly ok to discuss thoughts and emotions in public, to look at the ways that powerful encounters with other people, both positive and negative, have pulled upon your heart, transformed you, made you see the world in a new way. People talking about those things together can be an exhilarating, therapeutic, community building experience.
But it is not ok to use any of that as an excuse to go on a destructive tear.
And so I find that I am never tempted to just spin the steering wheel randomly, cause a ten car pile-up, find out what a head-on collision feels like, or what would happen if I just drove this sucker off that bridge.
After all, I’ve got places to go, and these thoughts and emotions are just the vehicle to get me there. So I’m going to put the top down, gun that accelarator, and go for a ride with whatever friends care to go along with me.
So how to overcome such an ingrained sense of privacy, a sensitivity instilled over decades of practice and parental admonition, that revelation of inner thoughts in public is improper or unbecoming? In such cases, all public emotional proclamantions equate to having ones’ pants down, and with holes in ones’ underwear (for isn’t that why one wears the good pair on outings, in case you get run over by a car and end up in the hospital?).
Now that may be overstating things somewhat (for effect only), but it still begs the question– can such a person every feel safe? Stay tuned…
Living in Cambridge, I find I’ve never really needed to own a car. Do you think this is why I’ve never felt the need to unload my emotions online? I’ve certainly had enough blogs to need several garages.
Er… my analogy has just fallen to pieces.
*waves* at Ken!