Honesty vs. Editing
I read lots of blogs.
And by lots, I mean way more than I should.
And I’ve been reading them for years, some sites up to 6 years now, when they were carefully or haphazardly coded by hand or with something clumsy like geocities and homestead. From this I have gotten a better sense of the folks that I’ve read, who they are, their history, and their occasional mood swings.
Reading things like this is.. not unlike building a friendship over years. The day to day is seamless and transparent. Slowly and cheerfully glowy. Reading through new blogs and digesting thier archives over 3 days + or so is somehow…not nearly as satisfying.
Recently I stopped by the site of someone I used to know and haven’t spoken to in nearly a year or so. The design of her blog is the same. Same Url. Same taglines.
Her blog is quite different now. Sanitized. All those entries that were brilliant and fucked up, earnest and wacky, deplorable and dejected, they are all gone. It’s sanitized to the briefest of technical/professional posts. It’s become a compartmentalization of her life.
I don’t fault her, certainly, we all have our reasons for putting what we do online, personal and professional. I concede that I’m far more censored with what I divulge online than I used to 4 years past when I first started. But it’s still a little weird. I akin my psychological reaction to this type of editing with getting a tattoo removed.
Now it’s a little different when folks pull down and relaunch a blog. That sort of reinvention doesn’t phase me nearly as much. It’s this…autobiographical and self archeological type of editing that I’m … oddly uneasy by.
I still can’t put my finger on it.
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