The Stuff You’re Not Supposed To Blog About
February 12th, 2007 by MarkTonight, I was chatting with one of my friends, and he pointed out that my posting frequency has declined. It’s true. I used to have all kinds of things I wanted to write about, and I thought they would be useful for other people. I wrote a lot. Recently, there have been things I’ve wanted write about, but I haven’t felt like they’ve been too appropriate.
There are some things that you’re just not supposed to blog about. Work is one, but I’ve pretty much been free of that restriction. Ron was about the most open minded reasonable boss imaginable, so he had no problems with me writing whatever I felt like about work. Now, I don’t really have any boss at all, so it’s even easier. Obviously, I would be the first to suffer if I wrote anything that hurt the school, but I’m still free of somebody else censoring my blog.
There are still other topics that seem to be off-limits. Specifically, writing about one’s love life is never a good idea. I have at least three aquaintances who have taken down their blogs due to this issue. If you write about the problems you have in a relationship, it will anger your current partner. If you write about how wonderful your partner is, then it may come to haunt you in the future when a future significant other wonders why you haven’t written anything that wonderful about that relationship.
Dating is the obvious blogging minefield, but there’s a much broader constraint: most people avoid writing about anything negative. I guess it’s part of the price of being such social animals. We don’t want to write anything that projects a less than spotless image of ourselves. I, too, have my pride, and I, too, have been affected by this sort of self-censorship. Obviously everyone has short-comings, but nobody trumpets them. It’s easy to write about the things one is good at, but the struggles are only recorded after they have been overcome.
I haven’t written as much lately because it’s been a rough several weeks.
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February 12th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Self-censorship is good, on most accounts. I never blog about work. I do blog about my tutoring, the lesson plans I use, what works and what doesn’t. But since I know that some people at work read my blog, you have to be careful.
I am always aware that prospective employers might read your blog.
February 13th, 2007 at 5:42 am
I’m not sure how I could have gotten so into blogging if it weren’t for writing about my job. I suppose I really don’t care that much about prospective employers. I am who I am, and if a future employer were to decide not to hire me due to facets of my personality or work ethic revealed by my blog, it would probably be for the best. I’d rather know right away if the job weren’t a good match, instead of wasting time somewhere I wouldn’t fit in.
That said, I currently have very little interest in ever having any future employers. Only the permanence of information put online restrains me at all.
February 16th, 2007 at 12:15 am
And the battle rages on…
Lately, I’ve been wrestling with this very question. We blog to be read (or else we would just keep everything on our hard drive), with a striving for authenticity and candidness. Yet such a penchant for the antisceptic!
Others, like MT, stick to a public area (politics), though it could be argued that this is a topic rich for developing the personal.
If you make your posts readable to only certain readers, that’s likely to put some off as well. Lately I’ve been wanting to write about my parents, for example, and get some feedback from those around me and from those not so near. But my parents read my blog and what I have to write about is not…umm…nice.
Isn’t part of blogging about finding others who share a common ground and connect? As social beings, we are already layered enough as it is, making meanigful contact with others rare. Personally, I feel compelled to take some emotional risks when writing.
And then I go back and delete the sentence, and try to replace it with something more cerebral, more “topical”.
Anyway, I’m in Phuket now and Iam afraid there’s njot much ,ore brain wav acton going on werht e;psj t.