Blogging as voyeurism/exhibitionism

It's interesting doing this blog thing--one of the main internal obstacles in the past was the sense that we're all becoming too dependent on these relatively impersonal technologies in order to stay in touch and know each other. Put bluntly, when I first started reading blogs I had this unnerving sense of being a kind of emotional voyeur. Now blogs by nature are at least semi-public media, and I wasn't using any underhanded techniques to learn what people's blog addresses were. Nevertheless, even when I'm just innocently linking from one friend's blog to another friend's blog, there is this sense of trespassing, particularly if a person is putting fairly personal things on their blog.

In particular I remember reading some blogs after a few months of being at my former church. I had recently started getting to know these people, I liked them, wanted to belong to their circle, and reading blogs seemed like a perfectly harmless way to pass the time. Then it became slightly addictive, as I began looking at more and more posts, hungry for because I was getting to know these people. And by reading the comments feature, you can even eavesdrop on conversations, to a point. I found that I felt like I was experiencing these people on a level I hadn't yet experienced their friendship in real life. And therein lies the problem. Getting to know someone's heart through a public journal, when you haven't arrived at that point of intimacy through real face-to-face relating--well, that's kind of cheating, isn't it?

In all cases, the the people in question were OK with me reading their blog. And in the ensuing years, I have indeed been able to know these people as friends through actual interaction. Yet it still happens once in a while, where when I see someone I am relating to them out of a context of knowing certain aspects of their life and attitudes, not necessarily because they shared it with me but because I read it on their blog. It is a strange multi-layered form of knowing people, receiving both from what they have shared with you alone and what they have chosen to share to at least a chunk of the general public.

On the other side of the coin, what is it that compels us to make these pseudo-public statements, in some cases offering more of ourselves than we do in conversation? Obviously it is a less threatening format. As I sit here in my bedroom typing away, I can't see anyone's facial expression--see it change with slight approval or disapproval at a certain idea or word choice, I don't have to deal with your interruptions, or experience the anxiety when you start looking off to the side to see if there's anything or anyone of higher priority demanding your attention. There aren't all the variables, situationally and emotionally, that inhibit normal (un-intoxicated) relating and sharing in the interpersonal realm.This also happens with e-mail--an amazingly great example of how a certain technology does not only facilitate communication, but has actually modified the way in which we communicate with each other. E-mail has changed the subtleties of how we communicate in our culture. For making plans, setting agendas, so many things, we just type out an e-mail and send it into cyberspace. In fact, there are many occasions where I would rather call and talk to the person in order to make the plans, ask for the favor, etc., but I increasingly feel an inappropriateness to it--why 'waste' the person's time when you can just send an e-mail? Also, often we can be bolder or more assertive with e-mail, because there is no instant response. We don't need to hedge or hesitiate or pull back from part of what we wanted to say because again, there is no dynamic facial expression feedback matrix staring us in the face. And because it's so instant, there is rarely the care which was traditionally placed into letters, for example. Now, obviously there are exceptions to this--I have received some extremely sensitively crafted e-mails, and sent a few myself. Normally, though I try to stick to a policy of never dealing with sensitive issues over e-mail. But that is becoming increasingly harder to do as our culture takes this mode of communication more and more for granted. So we state our positions, press the send button, then go about our business until we see that symbol flash and that new message appear in our inbox. Then we take a deep breath, press another button, and quickly read to determine the tone, key words, anything to give us a sense where the other person is really at. Then, once that emotional response is given time to settle, we can go back and review the entire e-mail more carefully.

I've been debating with myself the extent to which e-mail has also very subtly changed our personal interactions as well, but I'm not as sure of this one. Are we getting worse at hashing out issues on an interpersonal level, because we're getting used to doing more of that on e-mail? As much as we extoll the convenience of it, I am convinced that it is more the comfort of distance from others, even our friends in certain cases, that draws us to use it so much. When we would rather send e-mails to the room or the cubicle next door to us rather than get up and walk five steps to talk to the person, something is deteriorating in our society.

OK, that was actually an e-mail interlude--what I was getting to at first was the motivation of bloggers (such as myself) for posting intellectual manifestos and personal issues on blogs. In some ways, where distance is a factor, it can be a way to communicate with a large body of people without having to repeat yourself dozens of times. But is it also, as I mused with my friend earlier today, simply a way of crying out for attention? In a way, I'm saying 'this is really who I am and what I think, and I was too scared to share all of that with you in our conversation, or the conversation took a different turn, so here's what I want to say in the way I want to say it so . . . Love Me!

I have had enough experiences where the friend I read in a blog is different enough from the friend whom I interact with in real life that it makes you wonder . . . How much do we ever know anyone? Is the 'me' you read in this blog closer to 'who I really am', or is this rather a more self-indulgent version of me, and the 'me' that has to relate and interact with people is a more accurate picture of the Dan that God created?

This gets way deep into identity issues, and no time to pursue them now. Enough already. Enjoy my exhibition, all you peeping toms :)