So someone wondered when I’d be moving to Paris to join my French boyfriend. Good grief. Must have been my I love Paris post set him off, don’t you think? Blogging has hazards I hadn’t even considered. I mean, sure, I love imagining surroundings for bloggers I enjoy reading, but I also realise that that’s where the boundary to fiction lies. Yes, what I blog is (mostly) true, but there is so much that I don’t blog that unless you know me, the idea you have of me from these words probably has more to do with fiction than reality. Your imaginings, not my world. I suspect blogs are smokescreens as much as windows.
Sometimes I wonder what image of me and my life readers of this weblog get… But also how it changes when we meet or if we meet f2f frequently or if they know more of my personal stuff… Even how my image of myself differs from my images of my close friends and family :)
Thinking of blogs as smokescreens: I guess it has something to do with squeezing yourself (and often only some of your multiple identities) through the narrow channel, so those who read it get somehow fragmented abstract art picture and have to reconstruct what is behind it…
See also: Networking: YASNs vs. blogs on image of a person constructed from reading a weblog.
Next day: couldn’t resist to add a quote from a comment to Jill’s post by Collin
My blog is a window, but it’s only one window (of many) into the sprawling country mansion of my life, and it’s a window I only walk by when I’m in particular moods. If it’s the only window that some people know, it’s not that hard to imagine that those people would get certain ideas about me–that I think about academic stuff far more often than I actually do, that I spend less time fighting depression than I actually do, etc. Blogs tap into that desire that most of us have (as readers) to be insiders in other people’s lives, to strengthen our weak ties.
Tags: blog networking, blog readingArchived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2004/08/25.html#a1321; comments are here.
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