The Emotion of Blogging - Required Listening
I want to ask you a favor. If you have any time I would like you to go and listen to an MP3 recording made at BloggerCon IV about the Emotional Life of Blogging (that was the link to the MP3 in case you were wondering. Warning: Language) because I think it covers a whole lot of really interesting issues about the culture that this website is a part of and also about our society in general. If you want to see the brief notes of the session they are here.
The audio is taken from, a discussion led by Lisa Williams talking to a room full of people who write blogs like this one where she asks each person to come with a story and a question about why they blog and what is in it for them emotionally. The first story is from a guy who talks about finding his wife of 18 months dead on the bathroom floor completely unexpectedly and how, on that same day he started to write about what he was going through on his blog. He goes on to say how he felt freedom there to express himself in ways that he couldn’t in person and about all the support he received from those who read his website. It says something about the connectedness of our society and about societal norms that people are going online to find community. I look at the church as a hub of community in my world and I would hope that there are people at my church who I could talk to if I were going through a crisis but could I really? What I see in my church community is that people get a lot of support at the time of the event but that as time goes on and the acuteness of the crisis fades that people tend to be drawn away slowly into their daily world. The periodic nature of our church existence also mitigates against this, how often do we connect with our church community only twice or once weekly?
Blogging can be immediate, it allows us to connect with people not by demanding attention at a point in time but by allowing those who can and will connect to connect with us whenever they read and want to reply. Blogging is asynchronous in nature. What can we as a church learn from the nature of support that happens in the blogging world? I’d be interested in your insights.
The discussion in the session then gets down to a really interesting discussion of how deeply people share personal stuff on their blogs and some of the implications of doing that. I have posted on Vulnerability before and I can relate to some of the stories that people tell. My policy is, and has always been, that if someone objects to something that I have written about them that they should talk to me about it. I generally don’t use names on my blog but sometimes that is not enough. I have had occasion to take posts down in the past at the request of people and no doubt there will be occasions in the future to do so.
The experiences of people in the session were something I found really instructive. There were the trainwrecks and the success stories. The people who blogged about everything and the people who had no personal stuff at all. The people who blogged about their relationships and those that did not. It was a really good discussion and well worth listening to.
The rest of BloggerCon is good too (I’m about half way through as I write this) but I would seriously reccommend this MP3 to anyone wanting to understand more about what this is and where it is going. Reccommended.
