Blogosophy
Read an article on bloggers and blogging on the CNN site today.
The gist of the article as I read it is that blogging about every detail of your life may not be a good thing. The article touches on people losing their jobs, high school administrators feeling threatened, and people fearing retribution for revealing personal details. To me, this sounds like the same kind of fear mongering that has replaced factual reporting in our 10 second sound byte/entertain me now society. Why not continue to indulge ourselves in the fear-mongering. We have a war in Iraq, terrorists living in Great Britain, the high school kid next door could be a gun toting madman, and who the hell is tracking the sexual deviant last seen outside the grade school grounds. Now we can fear the internet. Thank you Al Gore!
It’s always interesting to me when people are concerned for my safety based on what I write or say. Is their fear really for me and my well being? Or more likely are they concerned I might possess an opinion that they disagree with and since they are afraid to post I will be heard and they won’t? That seems like the right question.
I do understand some of the fear. Whether we want to admit it or not, putting something in writing means more. It means more than a spoken comment and a heck of a lot more than an unspoken one. We as human beings attach more substance to the written word. Most likely because it takes much more effort to write than speak and of course, no matter how quickly we can post information, we still have the time to edit ourselves before we expose ourselves.
There are certainly strange and odd ideas out there in the WWW (wild wacky web). I possess several. I suspect that it is incumbent upon the reader of the web to separate the proper from the improper, the insane from the sane, and the evil from good. It’s probably that simple.
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem
The gist of the article as I read it is that blogging about every detail of your life may not be a good thing. The article touches on people losing their jobs, high school administrators feeling threatened, and people fearing retribution for revealing personal details. To me, this sounds like the same kind of fear mongering that has replaced factual reporting in our 10 second sound byte/entertain me now society. Why not continue to indulge ourselves in the fear-mongering. We have a war in Iraq, terrorists living in Great Britain, the high school kid next door could be a gun toting madman, and who the hell is tracking the sexual deviant last seen outside the grade school grounds. Now we can fear the internet. Thank you Al Gore!
It’s always interesting to me when people are concerned for my safety based on what I write or say. Is their fear really for me and my well being? Or more likely are they concerned I might possess an opinion that they disagree with and since they are afraid to post I will be heard and they won’t? That seems like the right question.
I do understand some of the fear. Whether we want to admit it or not, putting something in writing means more. It means more than a spoken comment and a heck of a lot more than an unspoken one. We as human beings attach more substance to the written word. Most likely because it takes much more effort to write than speak and of course, no matter how quickly we can post information, we still have the time to edit ourselves before we expose ourselves.
There are certainly strange and odd ideas out there in the WWW (wild wacky web). I possess several. I suspect that it is incumbent upon the reader of the web to separate the proper from the improper, the insane from the sane, and the evil from good. It’s probably that simple.
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem
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