BloggerCon II Weblog - Celebrating the art and science of weblogs, April 17 at Harvard Law School.

Permanent link to archive for 10/7/04. Thursday, October 7, 2004

Emotional Life of Weblogs

I am shut in a bone box and trying to fasten myself onto white paper.
- from the novel Free Fall written by Nobel Laureate William Golding.

We no longer use typewriters to create paper pages, but as we fit our fingers on the keyboard, letting the thoughts transfer into typed text, we are still trying to fasten ourselves onto something. How do blogs allow us to break free of our bone boxes and connect with each other? How are we fastening ourselves to our posts and to other people? What kinds of relationships are we building through blogging? Which sections of ourselves do we let others see? How do we choose what goes into our blogs?

In this BloggerCon session on the Emotional Life of Weblogs, we can share with each other our experiences in blog relationships and representations. What lines have you drawn concerning the personal content you put on your pages? How do you censor yourself? What communities have you discovered or created?

How does blogging impact relationships both inside and outside the blogging community? Does reading a person's posts provide a false sense of intimacy so that we assume we know someone? Are we "friends"? Or are we "strangers"? Who knows us best?

Do you blog about your family? Your lover? Your best friend? Your boss? Your neighbors? Why or why not? Have you shared something on your blog that encouraged someone else? Have you regretted writing a post because of the way it affected people you know? How are we connecting on- and off-line?

Some bloggers reveal intimate details of their days. What does it mean when we can know aspects of someone's private life yet we have never met in person and might not recognize each other if we did? What happens when we share things with each other on our blogs that are "taboo" to talk about in society or difficult to do face-to-face? How are we integrating ourselves? Is the person who appears on your blog different from the person who appears at BloggerCon?

At BloggerCon, I hope we can travel together through this terrain and share our experiences of connection. I also hope we can try to connect with other sessions. For example, I believe that Information Overload impacts relationships too, both within blogs and outside blogs. And the Core Values of the Web become the basis of building relationships through blogs.

Bring your bone box: let's discuss and discover what happens when we try to fasten pieces of ourselves onto a blog page.

# Posted by Julie Leung on 10/7/04; 2:06:46 AM - --