Just a day or two ago, I was chatting with a friend who also has a blog -- ironically enough an infidelity blog -- and who had just gone private for reasons of security. (No, this is not D. As far as I know, D doesn't blog.) Anyway, she talked about all the reasons that going private was better -- reasons with which, under the circumstances, it was hard to argue. But I objected that if we were all private all the time, we could never meet other people out there with similar interests or stories. Somehow there is an inherent risk in making any kind of connection with each other, but life without those connections gets lonely fast.
I was reminded of that conversation today, when I was talking to D. I asked her about one or another of the social networking tools out there -- I forget if it was Facebook or LinkedIn or what -- and asked her if she ever used it. She was horrified, and I realized right away that it was a stupid question. D is in many ways an intensely private woman -- the thought of putting facts about herself (even the most innocuous facts) out where the world can read them is something she finds almost impossible to imagine. When I told her (almost a year ago now) that I blog, it took her a very long time to wrap her mind around the fact.
What seems so odd to me is that there can never have been a woman alive more devoted to what she calls "community-building": making friends, keeping in touch with friends, connecting with people regularly throughout the day or the week. And I have to wonder if there is something a little strange in this picture: ceaselessly keeping in touch with friends around the world, tirelessly keeping the lines of communication open ... and yet building and guarding high walls so that the wrong things can't be seen by the wrong eyes.
Is that strange? Is it paradoxical? Or is it like the "paradox" of a free society, that it actually takes a strong government to ensure enough safety that people can afford to live freely? Is it no more than the old adage that "Good fences make good neighbors"?
I don't know the answer, and I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts. But I do know that without some openness -- some publicity, some risk -- we would all sit huddled behind our own walls and never meet each other at all. And that would be really lonely.
2 comments:
This is a real melon-scratcher, Hosea, but it's a topic that I am now working through on my own--if anybody can work through this topic successfully: is the infidelity blog world public and open and free to all by virtue of its anonymity, or is it characterised by those "walls" you mention?
I'm entirely new to the blogosphere, and my appearance here is mainly the result of a revelation/disclosure that I played a role in someone else's wonderfully-written blog. News of this was at first a bit painful for me. I had a hard time dealing with it partly because I thought it an infringement on my own "privacy": I was being talked about by a blogger and commented upon by readers and I wasn't invited! Then I was flattered: hey, I am being written about by someone I genuinely adore, and some in her blog circle are in on it too, and that's quite the ego stroke.
I thought I had a better, or at least more sophisticated, point here. I guess it's just that, yes, the "privacy" or inner circle nature of that blog was an irritant that fired my head with negative epithets: hypocrisy, lies, double standards, deception, and so on. But now I'm more inclined to lighten it up, place it into that world of laughable loves and just call it an irony. At least with that term we don't feel compelled to say that infidelity blogs ought to be irresponsibly public or guardedly private. I think. Thanks for listening.
Privacy is really important for D, too. Not only does she find it almost incomprehensible that I would blog at all (thus exposing very private things about my life), she finds it alarming that I talk about her. I have tried to explain my view of this, but to no avail; she prefers simply to wrap the whole thing in a box called "Stuff About Hosea That I Don't Get" and park it on a high shelf out of reach.
The view that I have tried to explain to her -- and the one I would urge on anybody who felt uncomfortable being discussed in an anonymous blog -- is that the blog's very anonymity means that (in some sense) it's not about you at all. It's about some crazy person out on the Internet somewhere, and we all know there are lots of those. When I write about my affair with D, or my wife's infidelities with ... oh, take your pick ... I'm not breathing a word about [my real name] who lives in [my home] and who works at [my job]. I am, instead, talking about some guy named Hosea, who is made out of electrons and who lives on a Google server some place. And if his life is all messed up, that's no reflection on me.
As to the general question of walls ... the more I think about it, the more necessary I think they are, precisely in order to allow the growth of some common understanding.
An easy example: If I weren't careful to filter out anything that might identify me personally, I could never discuss that part of my life defined by sexual infidelity (whether mine or my wife's).
Likewise when D talks to her colleagues at work, or her friends at church, she generally doesn't tell them about me. For that matter, even before she was involved with me, she probably didn't let most people understand what a torrential force sexuality is in her life. Why not? Well obviously if her colleagues or church friends knew those kinds of things about her, most of them would be scandalized or at any rate put off. Knowing those things about her would shut down the possibility that she could communicate with them on things that they really do share. Which means that those kinds of walls of privacy really do play an essential role in community-building. On this model, we should expect people who let it all hang out to have fewer friends than people who are a little more tasteful or reserved about what they say to whom.
It's an interesting theoretical point, actually ....
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