it's all about control*

*You're right, Pacanukeha, it truly is.

With all this chatter - here and elsewhere - about the potential - real and imagined - "risks" of blogging racing around lately, I've been thinking a lot about public/private relations, the idea of sharing rants, raves, thoughts, and ideas with the handful of people I know read this space semi-regularly, and about the relationship of the blog writer to all of this. And of my relationship as regular reader and writer of semi-"private" texts. I know others have been thinking about it too - just yesterday nk posted a beautiful explication of the role technology has played in our everydays - simultaneously giving us the illusion of borderless, boundary-free communication bringing us closer together and exposing the near-impossibility of that ideal.

Ever have a "tiff" with someone not live and in person? Oh the signal-crossing, miscommunication and unintentioned innuendo that ensues! Usual behaviour becomes reread, words without physical language get misconstrued, tensions amplify.

Yesterday, someone passed along this web address to a mutual friend without my knowledge. It wasn't done with any ill-intent (quite the contrary, actually, it was done with the very best of intentions), but my immediate reaction to it has given me serious cause for pause. I got a bit mad - both angry and a bit nutso - at finding out. Actually, I should clarify: I wasn't mad at the recipient receiving the information, I was mad because I didn't find out from the person who transmitted the information. I wasn't consulted. I wasn't in control, however loosely, of who could enter this space and read my words.

Ridiculous? Yes, I know. That's where the nutso comes in. I got angry at the casual passing of this address. How ridiculous? It's available as a link on multiple sites. It's searchable (how it got to be, I'm not sure, but it is) on the Blog Search Engine. Each and every post is available to any casual surfer who wants to read what is mostly innocuous, inane drivel that I shovel on a regular basis. Keep in mind that I just found out its searchableness when I did a little search of my own this morning - so angry came first, realization of this blog's actual public-ness came second, the sheer ridiculousness of my nutso reaction came third.

So you're walking through the process of my very unsophisticated bubble bursting and of thinking this through with me.

It's sort of like my cell phone - I have one, but can't remember the number, and use it predominantly for text messaging when it's cheaper to spend the dime on a short text than a phone call. But, my cell is a pay-as-you-go phone, and the thought of someone calling for a random, non-urgent chat at 25 cents a minute is just incomprehensible to me - and I would be angry if someone casually passed it off to another. But it's really not the same thing: it has to do largely with my own ambiguous relationship with telephone communications and the fact that I'm broke. I don't have that relationship with this space - it's not about money and it's not about my time. Yet, I find myself oddly protective of my decision to share or not to share.

So what is this all really about?

It's about control. Or rather, the illusion of having any at all outside of making a decision about what to write and post.

And it's about my own very strong desire to control. Which, of course, is more about my own arrogance and my own insecurities than anything or anyone else.

I've also never been a journal-keeper, and I'm slowly, slooooooooooooowly coming to see a blog very much in that light - as a sort of Victorian era diary-keeping with the overt fantasy/fallacy of privacy that goes alongside it. nk once described it once as being "...partly audience based...partly voyeur...partly need to express...the feeling that one's voice belongs...a good way of working out insecurities as well...a good, safe?, place."

nk also once described the action of hitting "Publish Post" as hitting "a secret scaredy cat button." nk is one smart cookie who cleanly and skillfully cuts through the bullshit.

Of course it's the possibility of a 'virtual' audience that both urges some posts and precludes others. And of course it's that precarious position that keeps the ball rolling.

Of course.

***

Now that I'm thinking aloud about this whole thing, it's actually connected to a bunch of other little instances.

Definitely to the conversations that have been buzzing around what I've taken to calling the blogacademy, the rise of anti-intellectualism, and the precarious position my own research holds within an ever-changing field - all of which directly point to my own nervousness about finishing this degree and trying to 'fit' within a system that is slowly but surely closing its doors to particular kinds of humanities-based scholars. It's fear and the inability to control the future.

Probably to my (momentary, but it was there) agonization over Anon posting a request on Avenger's site telling me to open up this space to anonymous comments. But eventually doing it. The relinquishing of control was a really tough one, but the decision to do so has made this space much more interesting and interactive and alive with the inclusion of Anon's thoughts to the discussions.

And how Anon has become another person in this little community that we are all slowly getting to know. A person who reads and thinks and responds and who is faceless but named: just like all of us.

At the end of May/beginning of July, when a bunch of us decided to give this blog thing a whirl, I remember marveling with avenger about how knowing the writer in one context and then reading them in another almost seemed like a fresh portal into their mind - a way of understanding them on an entirely different level. As academics - who write largely because they must - the experiment seemed even more telling; particularly when the personal fell through the well constructed intro-method-theory-body-conclusion of the scholarly frame. There was something about this medium that made the thinking and the writing and the 'publishing' markedly different than producing texts for an academic space that probably fewer, in the long run, would read. Especially when those predominantly doing the consuming were friends. Avenger has since dropped out of the conversation. As has Trying to Blog it Out. And what I'm most surprised of is how much I miss reading those posts regularly.

I suspect this experiment has taken a new turn.

***

I've always felt as though my written language was more measured, far stronger, more convincing, and less muddled than what actually flies out of my mouth on a regular basis. I'm really beginning to rethink that, too.