Crabby person on blogging
Peter passed this–in newspaper form–to me*, saying, do you want to read this? The headline howls: BLOGGERS WHO BARE ALL ABOUT THEIR LIVES NOW FACE A BRUTAL BACKLASH.
Well . . . yes. Are we supposed to be surprised? That ‘now’ is ingenuous. Blogging used to be called ‘gossip’. You’ve always needed to be careful what you say over the back fence to your neighbour or to the boss’ secretary over the water cooler**, because you don’t know who they’re going to tell, or who whom they tell will tell. Blogging, it’s just a little more straightforward. You only have to put it out there once and . . . there it is.*** You may be lucky but it seems to me you want to assume that you won’t be and behave accordingly. I’ve had a privacy fetish all my life so I’m not hugely tempted to be indiscreet here, but just as a failsafe I have a short list of people in the back of my mind that I pretend are reading every word (when in fact I’m reasonably sure they wouldn’t be caught dead coming anywhere near a blog by me), and this is like a klieg lamp over the set. Anything that shouldn’t be there is removed immediately, before the cameras start rolling.†
So the article is here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/may/25/digitalmedia.blogging
And my chief reaction is, Where was this girl’s†† brain? I’m sorry for anyone who’s having a miserable time††† but the word ‘twit’ is rising irrepressibly to my lips/fingers. You trash someone in public, they’re really very likely to try to trash you back. I’d hazard that people you’ve slept with are probably going to be especially touchy that way. Someone else who also blogged about her love life is quoted in this article: ‘When the people in my life knew that my interactions with them were potential fodder for something I might write, things changed.’ Gosh. Imagine. So, I wonder who the first detox clinic for out of control all-baring bloggers is going to be named after?
Peter is allowed, we spend a lot of time sitting on opposite sides of the same table, but I get a bit testy at all the ‘ooooh, there’s a blog backlash’ flapdoodle. Anything there is, there’s going to be a backlash. Another universal constant, like the speed of light. ‡ The bigger the thing, the bigger the backlash. Blogging’s got pretty big.‡‡ Duh. And there are always twits, and twits make backlashes so easy.
http://robinhobb.com/rant.html
One of you sent this link to me originally (sorry: I’m supposed to be keeping track of who sends me links now, but this was from back when I was only supplying names with recipes) and I read it and thought it was very funny, and then saw some reactions to it that I thought were a trifle odd: what you might call the wrong kind of serious. She’s making a valid point but she’s doing it, you know, humorously. ‘Vampires of the Internet . . . it is NO COINCIDENCE that blog and blood begin with the same three letters! . . . Look at your hands, where your wrists hover so lightly above your keyboard. What are those minute, strange marks there, on your pulse point? Could they be punctures the size of a pixel? . . .’ People take stuff in more easily when it’s funny, they let their guard down. You can even take the point and still laugh.
You can also still have a blog, if you want to. It’s your life and your time and your decision. ‡‡‡ I like Robin Hobb’s rant.§ Most of the rest of the ‘backlash’ I look at with my yokel face and go, What the–?
* * *
* . . . several days ago. I’m slow. This is not news.
** Do offices have water coolers any more? And did people ever collect around them?
*** The drawback is that it’s harder to change your story. Sure, you can edit, but most people remember what they read better than they remember what they heard. ‘Oh, well, maybe she did say six husbands and £600,000,000. I could have sworn it was two husbands and £50.67 and they argued about who got the kune kune pig.’
† If cameras still roll. They probably just flash digitally at 186,281 blinks per second.
†† Yes. Definitely girl.
††† I’m sorry for child molesters and axe murderers–what a life they’ve given themselves. But I’m sorrier for their victims.
‡ But they’re arguing about it.
‡‡ So big that publishers and agents now think that their authors should be doing it.
‡‡‡ And for the record, this blog doesn’t eat my writing. It eats my life.
§ I wonder if anyone did a mass-mailing^ of Hobb’s rant to publishers?
^ Mass link mailing.