Up til now I have sent emails to a large group of contacts, advising them of the latest entry in this worldsafari space. I thought of it as like sending a postcard. Like an update. This began in late 2004 when we moved to Darwin.
So, nearly six years later, what’s changed? Well we’ve settled in East Brunswick, CJ & I have worked at a few different jobs, we have two kids and made new friends over that time. That’s the obvious stuff.
The world had changed too, of course, and I’m thinking of cyber-world for a moment, like identify theft and remotely accessing your machine etc etc. It makes the idea of public blog kind of odd. Why would you do it? Why do millions of people continue to post personal information about themselves online? Facebook is a good example of this. Why, oh why, do many of us spend our lives doing this?
There must be a need, unmet through our regular day-to-day lives, to contact people. But instead of sharing, it’s more like a kind of platform, or podium from which we can launch an “identity”. A brand. A way that we would LIKE the world to see us. It’s dressed us as being about people sharing, but from what I can see, there’s a helluva lot of talking/ typing/ posting going on, but I doubt how much listening/ reading/ thinking is taking place.
Yes, everyone seems to have a story to tell. Mini autobiographies in 140 words or less. They have a sore knee. They are thinking of going to Tibet. They are eating a steak sandwich. They heard their child say a word. They were awarded a pig on Farmville (huh?) . Here’s a photo of them in front of Westminster. And another at the leaning tower of Pisa. Golly.
Online social networking would have us believe that we are becoming closer together as we share this stuff with friends. But I think it’s less about “sharing”, which is clearly best done in person, and more about people creating their image and fanning their little fires.
Which leads me to the blog space. Why would I keep posting on a public forum personal information? Do I pretend that other people care? No. Do I try to create an image of myself that I hope others buy into? Maybe.
I’m grappling with the idea of letting it go. When our computer & back ups were stolen last year, without the blog being online, I would have lost the whole record. Because it’s online, it will always be there.
I plan to keep posting online, but to stop sending notifications so regularly. Maybe that’s a compromise for now…
