I stopped really updating my blog around early 2008, I think. I had just become employed in my first and only full-time 9 -5 job after dropping out of university because I couldn’t afford to go anymore.
Facebook was getting more popular, and non-geeks had become fully integrated into the Internet. It was becoming increasingly difficult to hide an online presence from the offline world, or guarantee that I could write about life and ideas in a way where 1) all my writing would be public, even if anonymous; 2) my current employer or clients and other stakeholders thereof could be guaranteed to never find what I wrote and come to the conclusion that the content was created by me.
That was shitty. I liked to be able to have opinions about things, even if upon reading them later, I thought, “that was angsty” or “how did that logical fallacy occur”, or “I made THAT grammar error”? I’ll probably do the same with this post one day.
But I found that I was continually censoring what I was writing and making old posts private, and then only writing things that I thought were “vanilla” enough that if a boss or whoever happened to see them, they could read the whole damn blog and not be able to figure out anything about me — even if they knew that the blog was written by me.
WELL, THAT RESULTS IN A COMPLETE SUPPRESSION OF….. EVERYTHING, DOESN’T IT?
I have no idea who read this before. I know my twin brother Byron faithfully read this and left thoughtful comments. I know other people read it because they would sometimes tell me that they had read something on my blog, and some people even said they liked it.
That was 4 years ago.
I was an ok writer. At that time, I still thought of myself as a writer in the artistic manner. I had dropped out of school while pursuing an English degree. NOW, I’m finally almost done my degree that I started in 2007. It’s not in English; it’s in Sociology. And I don’t write creatively; I write mechanically. I am not the “creative” person I used to be.
I digress.
I have been unemployed by choice for almost 5 months — I quit my job so that I could finally graduate with the money I had saved up. Slowly I have started to become myself again. I’m not chilled by the thought of someone reading what I have to say the way I was while employed.
It’s a pretty shitty reality, but it IS reality. As a follower of Foucault’s writings about surveillance and the internalization of discipline, I can at least reflect on the shitty reality with some appreciation since it is ever-relevant to some of my research interests. That is worth something, right?
Still, I have become so used to the anxiety of “what if the wrong person reads what i wrote” that I have become less comfortable with talking about certain things in a public forum. Before I was pretty confident about that kind of stuff. That is not the same thing as being an exhibitionist, mind you. I don’t think I was ever really an exhibitionist, but people mistake “talking about taboo/controversial” subjects comfortably as “exhibitionism.”
I would like to think that I still can write creatively, but as mentioned above, it’s all so mechanical.
So we will see.
HELLO INTERNET.
