Many thanks to my friend and blogging compatriot Justin (of Letters from Suburbia) for posting a link to Emily Gould's NY Times Magazine article about her motivations to blog and how, why and when to share personal details on a completely open and unfiltered platform.In the lengthy piece (which, if you have some time, is well worth the read), she details her history with blogging, her time at Gawker and, after a series of personal revelations, her experience being stripped and exposed on a very public level.
It got me thinking about how I pick and choose what I write about here. I've been working on this blog for almost a year now and I'm nearing the 100-post mark. While I don't actively promote the site, I do link to it on Twitter and Facebook and include it in the signature of all my emails. My readership isn't anything to brag about, but it holds steady at around 100 visits a week or so - mostly from people I know, but I do get reasonable traffic from complete strangers who stumble across the blog looking for Anchorman quotes or Googling "Puerto Rican bosoms." (Seriously).
Knowing how accessible anything on the web can be, I'm generally very careful about what I write here. You'll notice I've never written anything negative about the jobs I've worked, refrained from sharing political views and haven't even mentioned the name of the town where I live. Where I'm ever more careful, though, is stuff that I consider private. Very little of what's on this site is uber-personal. Sure, everything I write is about me. It's got my name on it and I'm not making any of it up. But you will rarely catch me talking about anything that I wouldn't tell a complete stranger, either.
After reading the article and weighing the amount of sharing that I've done here, I realized that I had, subtlety and unconscious, developed a blogging persona. I'll call him Blogger Mike.
Blogger Mike is not too different from Real Mike in many ways - they both like the same foods, the same sports, the same music and the same coffee. But the Blogger Mike doppleganger (should I call him B.M. for short? ha.) is both way more self-deprecatory and pretentious than his R.M. counterpart. I think B.M. is also funnier, more cynical, thinks he's more tech-savvy, asserts himself with too much self-important mannerisms and has better breath than R.M.
Sonja, who is the fiancee of both B.M. and R.M. whether she likes it or not, hates that B.M. never talks about her. Whereas, as R.M.'s friends know, he never shuts up about her. That online silence was a very intentional choice. It's just that my relationships (family, friends and the many, many, many love interests) have always been a very personal experience for me. One I didn't feel was necessary to share online with God-knows-who's-reading-this.
In the last two posts (and a little in this one), R.M. broke through. I'm not at all sad that he did, it's just funny that it almost took a year for it to happen. And who knows if it'll happen again? If it does, it'll probably take another year.
Emily Gould's piece just got me thinking about why I blog and how much of myself I'm really sharing with the world. In one sense, I'm sharing a lot - people would never know half the stuff about R.M. if it wasn't posted here. But 95% of everything that's here comes from the B.M. version - and he doesn't even know half of what makes up the R.M. At least, I like to think there's a separation. When doing any kind of writing, it's always good to keep a little mystery in there; you have to leave 'em wanting more.
(You get more hits that way.)
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Question of the day: Do you, too, have an online persona in order to maintain a semblance of privacy? If so, how do you balance the two?
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2 comments:
I hear ya. It's hard. I don't mind humiliating myself on the internet, but I try to be respectful and not really talk about my friends online just out of privacy. I don't want my people to worry that anything they say or do might end up on the internet!
Also, to be safe I assume everyone I know will read it. Can't write about work cause my boss might read it, can't write about boys cause they'll read it, and also have to edit my misadventures in case my mom ever finds this thing...
After all of that, it's a wonder I can write anything! Sometimes I consider making up a fake Liz, one with an exciting life, filled with all these other made up people and write about my really exciting job and all the really exciting stuff I do. It would all be a tangled web of lies...... but it would be a hell of a lot less boring. :)
I only worry about your parents reading...lol
I try not to give out too much info but with a name like "lindabeth" and I've said I'm in grad school (unnamed school), it's likely easy to google me.
sorry i've outed you in the past as my cousin. :-P
other personal bio i like to leave out sometimes, because i don't people to use it to try to "explain" why I say x so they don't have to take it seriously.
i.e. when I cross-posted about the lesbians at the Seattle baseball game, a commenter "assumed" I was a lesbian and referred to me as "you all." whatever I happen to be doesn't make the heteronormative double standard any less real but it becomes an easy way to attack the writer and not take them seriously.
there's also a really bad history of brutal attackers on feminist blogs and luckily I'm not popular enough to attract them yet! Women, especially feminists have it really bad--people attacking their feminism by attacking them-calling them ugly or the ever so classy "show us yer titz!" or even threatening rape. Bitch magazine had a good article on it last issue.
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