I’ve been reading and experiencing things lately that have really gotten me thinking about blogging, social media, and why people share so much of themselves online. If you’re looking for deep insights into this or some sort of logical argument, step away from the blog. My own thoughts are rather a jumble.
I often ask myself how all this happened. In 2003, I had no online presence. If you’d Googled me you’d find nothing. I was on the Web a lot, but as a consumer of content. Adam tried to get me to start a blog that year, but it didn’t take. I was just about to start library school at the time and I really didn’t have any burning desire to communicate with others on any specific topic. I didn’t even read blogs.
Flash forward five years. I’ve been blogging for 3 1/2 years. I have presences on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Slideshare, del.icio.us and a whole bunch of places I can’t even remember. But what’s weirder to me is how much of myself I share on this blog. When I first started this blog, I tended to write newsy posts with the occasional post thrown in about my job hunt. Somehow, over time, my blog posts became more personal, more “me.” And something about that must have connected with people, because my readership grew quickly.
I’ve never been the type to engage in gratuitous self-disclosure. I rarely talk to people at work (other than one colleague whom I consider a good friend) about my life outside of work. When I was a therapist, we were always cautioned to be careful about self-disclosure. Careful self-disclosure can actually be good for the therapeutic relationship, but too much of it isn’t and usually indicates that we’re focusing more on ourselves than on the client (a hazard since a lot of us go into the mental health field because we’re a little off-kilter ourselves). I knew certain therapists who did self-disclose an awful lot and their therapy sessions felt more like two friends gabbing than like therapy (which isn’t a good thing). I self-disclosed rarely and only in an effort to break through resistance.
I read an article yesterday from the New York Times about a blogger who used to write for Gawker who discussed her experiences with gratuitous self-disclosure online. Reading this, it felt to me like her ego was the size of Manhattan and I noted how ironic it was that she was disclosing so much (about herself and others) in attempting to write about her regrets regarding her past disclosures. That she’d write about boyfriends against their wishes just to get her “fix” from her readers/commenters made it feel like an addiction… as if the blog about her life became more important than her life. It definitely got me thinking — not that my self-disclosures are anywhere near her level and I certainly put the people I love over blogging. But there were little things that felt familiar there. I’ve had moments where I regretted sharing too much, where I felt panic-attacky and nauseous with regret over it. And it made me wonder if I share for the ego trip. I don’t know. I’m sure some of it has to do with ego. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching my readership grow, especially in that first year when it was so unexpected. Then again, I can’t remember the last time I looked at my webstats or how many subscribers I have. And this blog certainly isn’t “my everything.” I’d take a day outside with Adam over writing a blog post any day.
I notice that my blog started to get more personal as I started to connect more with real people online. I had a few regular readers and commenters whom I got to know and like, and I wanted to share things with them, both good and bad. Personal and professional, online and real world all seemed to blur together.
I’ve always been nervous about calling the people I primarily interact with online “friends”. The main reason is for fear that they wouldn’t consider me the same. But whatever. You are my friends. I may see you several times a year or we may never have met in person, but it doesn’t matter. When you have a baby, I’m happy for you and I ooh and ahh over your photos and I wonder how you’re coping with this huge change. When you get a new job, I’m excited for you. When something bad happens, I think about you frequently and hope things are getting better. I have three online friends who’ve been going through really tough times lately, and have all written about it on their blogs. Do I see that as gratuitous? No! I’m grateful that they keep us up with how they’re doing and I hope that supportive comments from me and their other friends provide some measure of comfort. I don’t know what I’d do if Michelle and her husband weren’t writing daily updates about their son. I was crying at my desk when I first saw the posts from Ries about the baby being sick. I check their blog several times every day and it makes me feel so much better to know that their little guy is getting better. I don’t know what to call this thing if not friendship.
Jenny Levine wrote in a recent (excellent) post “for most of my professional career, the line between work and personal has been blurred, making it difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends.” Me too. I don’t see the point of trying to separate these different pieces of my life since each is so intricately connected to and impacted by the other. That doesn’t mean I disclose every intimate detail of my life. I never mentioned on this blog that Adam was seriously ill this winter and how absolutely terrified I was. But I pretty much avoided talking to anyone about it because I kept bursting into tears. I can only write about it now because he’s doing so much better. Even when librarians write about their personal lives, I don’t feel like they’re taking part in gratuitous self-disclosure. Sometimes they’re trying to keep their friends up with what’s happening in their life. Sometimes they’re just using their blog to process their own thoughts and feelings. All good things.
Laura Crossett has been thinking about the same thing:
I’ve been pondering a good deal lately about the nature of online communication and whether, when we post something either good or bad, we are doing so in order to be informative or in order to garner accolades or condolences. I haven’t come up with an answer, but I have realized that, for me, the online world and the regular world have bled into each other so much that I can’t always separate out what happens in my real life into distinct parcels that fit neatly into pre-printed grids. I was always fairly good at coloring inside the lines when I was a kid, and I used to hate it when I made mistakes. Some years later, it seems to me as though mistakes are pretty much the currency we trade in, if we’re honest.
Well put, Laura. The lines have become so blurry I can hardly see them anymore. While this is an individual blog, I feel like it’s part of a much larger community. And I feel close to a lot of the people in that community, even if I stay away from Twitter for long periods of time and suck at staying in touch (it’s not so different from how I am with friends in real life). Reading each other’s blogs, IMing once in a while… it doesn’t sound like much, but we’ve somehow built friendships out of these online communications. I know more about some of my online friends than I do about the people I work with every day. In bad times, it feels good to have the support of my friends in the blogopshere, to know they’re thinking of me. And it’s nice to be able to support them. I can tell you that finding a gazillion kind birthday wishes in Facebook this morning made me feel like a million bucks. It doesn’t take much to write the “happy birthday” Wall post, but it means a lot to the person who gets it.
And all this is more than just about making new friends. Social media has enabled us to reconnect with old friends so much more easily. I had a really amazing experience with social media recently. A year and a half ago, when my grandfather was dying, I was going through old photo albums at my parents’ house and scanning photos from my childhood, which I then put on Flickr. One was of me, my brother and my best friend from kindergarten, Jennifer, with whom I haven’t been in contact since I was 11 or 12. Last week, I saw that I had a friend request on Facebook and it was from none other than Jennifer, who is now married and is a lawyer in New York City. She had been looking for her sister-in-law’s (also named Jennifer) Flickr account and instead came upon a photo of herself from 26 years ago. I mean, how crazy is that?!? We caught each other up on where we are in our lives, and it was so nice to know that she’s done so well for herself. She didn’t know my married name and probably never would have found me if not for that little bit of serendipity caused by my putting that photo online.
It feels good to reconnect with the people who were critically important to us in the formative years of our lives. While we lose touch with so many of them, we share these common memories of those years, and those will always connect us. It’s so nice that Facebook brings us together, and in such an easy low-commitment way. I have no idea if Jennifer would have emailed me; that might have been more of a commitment or more effort than she wanted. But with Facebook, you can just “friend” someone and keep up with them without sending emails or doing much of anything other than visiting their profile. It’s this easy sort of connecting that has brought me back in touch with so many old high school friends. I love it!
So if I’d hidden in the shadows, if I hadn’t put myself out on the web, would I have made all these connections with wonderful people around the world? Would I have reconnected with all these wonderful friends from many years ago? Not a chance. So, no, I don’t think I blog to have my ego stroked. I do it because in doing it, I connect to this wonderful community of people whom I’ve come to care deeply about. It’s not all about me (as in the case of that girl from the New York Times); it’s all about us.
I agree on many areas with you Meredith. Although I have been blogging for only a few months, it comes natural to share what is important to me with whoever visits my blog.In my view there is a difference in sharing what I feel is important to me than to display whta I think is important about me.
Sokeep doing the good work your doing. You have inspired many people to be more proud and to recognize their own voices, both personal and professional.
Great post, Meredith! As long as I’ve been online, I’ve fluctuated between “I think I’m sharing too much” and “Maybe I’m not sharing enough.” We’re all still getting used to the internet, how much information is and can be made available, how much we should or shouldn’t put online.
I will say, regarding what Laura said, that when I post things online, I’m doing it to inform my friends AND to solicit accolades or condolences–just like when I share personal information offline. We’re human and we want feedback from people. I don’t think there’s anything particularly perverse in that. But I do think it’s fascinating and mysterious and wonderful how the lines between online and offline, between professional and personal are drifting and blurring.
Thank you for this post! I’m still trying to figure out “what this thing is” myself and I think you illustrated the pertinent points beautifully.
This also ties into a blog from Lorcan Dempsey about ego-centric and object-centric networking…
http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/001601.html
I’m part of a group of online friends that have formed a ‘virtual pub’ on the weekends. We just post comments to the host’s blog entry. We chit-chat, tell bad jokes, and review the beer-of-the-week. It’s interesting because it’s a group of real people in a virtual environment…as opposed to many actual bars where the inverse is true.
Very cool stuff! Thanks!
Dear Meredith,
On a more philosophical note, I find it interesting how our self-disclosure and blending between professional and personal lives actually draws society closer to the sense of a small-town. While I’ve never personally lived in a small town, my impression is that in a small town everyone knows everyone else’s business for better and for worse. And while it can be risky to be so open about ourselves in an online environement, readers certainly can benefit from the honesty shared by bloggers. Thank you Meredith and others who share their lives with us.
=)
Paige
What a wonderful post, Meredith. I think about this a lot myself, and keep going back and forth on how much I want to disclose about myself… how much is helpful… how much is gratuitous.
Of course, I don’t have any answers, either, but it’s always nice to know that this is something that a lot of us think about. It’s easy to look at people’s blogs and think that somehow they’ve got their public/private ratio all worked out in their heads and that you’re the only one who can’t seem to make up your mind.
And I’m *truly* glad that Adam’s doing better.
Excellent post. It is a great relief to know that even someone with such a vibrant online presence shares the same anxiety about “over-sharing” as I.
I’m not sure if you attended ACRL Baltimore but one thing that David Silver talked about in his presentation was about “blogging the whole you”. This post exemplifies that.
Well done and well said.
This was a timely post. A few months ago, blogging wasn’t something I ever saw myself doing. I was perfectly content to keep my own journal and let that be the end of it. Recently, I’ve wanted to find a way to let people in my life (who I no longer see due to distance) know what’s going on with me and a blog is a simple way to let those old friends in to your present life. And as you make that attempt to connect, more you who you are shows up in your writing. It’s a progressive revealing of yourself to friends old and new and a wonderful way to connect with others. I guess if we’re asking ourselves the question “am I disclosing too much”, there is some internal censor at work which can keep us within limitations which are both comfortable and able to reach out to others.
So well said. Michelle’s story brought up the same thoughts (and feelings) for me. I think whether you have met or not, once you relate to people you bond with them on a certain level. The tool is the technology, it’s still human beings using it.
my own jumbled thoughts:
I have been blogging off and on since about 2002 with several different services and communities, and I have always struggled with differentiating between my “online” and “real” presence.
I think that many people, myself included, have a difficult time reconciling the two when in fact no reconciliation is necessary anymore. I think we’ve moved well beyond the point where our “online presence” is different from (or must be differentiated by) our “real selves” – the ubiquity of Facebook and its effects on internet anonymity have changed that, for better or for worse, forever. Blogs have simply become another facet of our public selves..
nice blog.
I think this is was a wonderful post. There is a fine line in blogging about how much of your personal life you share, but you have to share some of yourself to connect with readers. I personally have a professional blog where I talk about library related things, and a personal blog that my friends and family read to see what I’m up to and what I’m thinking. This works for me, but it’s a lot of work.
As far as the sense of community, I would like to say that all of the bloggers out in Libraryland help me to love my job even more. When all you see are your local coworkers and hear the same complaints and problems all the time, it is easy to get discouraged and unhappy in your job. But when I read everyone’s blogs and see that everyone else is going through the same things, and that people out there really have a passion for libraries (the way I do), it really makes me happy to be a librarian. I can take the things I’ve read and share them with my coworkers, and it makes all of us want to do better in our place of work.
So, thank you for blogging about work and whatever you would like to share about your personal life. I’m happy to be a part of your community!
Although my wife, Michelle, is not new to blogging, I certainly am. I also do not tend to talk about myself and I usually feel uncomfortable receiving accolades. However, blogging about our son’s troubles has been a source to both vent and to receive comfort. It feels therapeutic to write some of these thoughts down and many of peoples comments have been moving.
I started to read your post and got worried. Some of the things you mentioned I was doing. Checking my stats, logging in frequently just to check and see if somebody else commented. I hadn’t thought about it but now I was wondering if my ego was driving me to post.
But my fears subsided as I continued to read. When I have talked to people face to face I was surprised that they wanted to read more. They truly wanted to be kept up-to-date. That is why I do it. It is much easier to write it down and let every body who cares read about it. Then I don’t have to repeat the same thing over and over.
And Michelle cherishes her “online” friends.
Ries, EVERYONE looks at their stats a lot when they first start blogging. It’s always surprising to find that people are reading what you write (the comments always mean a lot, no matter how long you’ve been blogging). At that point, it’s much more about the novelty of it all. 🙂
I can’t tell you how much your posts have meant to me and my husband. We were so worried about Gideon when we heard about his problems and it has been so nice to get these updates when we live so far away and can’t be near y’all. And I’m glad to hear that writing this has also been therapeutic for you too. I feel the same way about blogging; sometimes it’s just easier to write it down than to talk about it.
You and Michelle are awesome. I’m so glad your little guy is doing so much better!!!
Well, I’m glad to see from this that we’re all negotiating this online community thing in our own ways. I don’t think anyone has all the answers, because it’s all about our own feelings about disclosure and online connection and the way the online community we’re a part of is structured. And I would guess that our willingness to put ourselves out there online will wax and wane throughout our lives depending on how connected we feel to others online.
Thanks for sharing your own feelings on this; I look forward to learning more about how other people navigate all this.
For me the question hasn’t really been the line between personal and professional — that line blurs and changes in real life as much as in online life. Nor is it the oddity of relationships via the internet; as sylvie mentioned above, it’s still human beings behind the tools.
It’s the sheer openness of sharing on the internet that holds me back. For example, many people express the idea that commenters should act as if they are “in somebody’s living room” when they comment on a post. But truthfully, I think that’s a foolish comparison. A website or blog is OPEN TO ANYONE with online access, including total strangers who you have never seen before and will never seen again, whereas in my house, you are there only if I have specifically invited you in.
Many people struggle with putting themselves out there on a blog because of the inherent conflict between openness to strangers and sharing with friends, and there is no way around it except with passwords. But passwords defeat the purpose of the open sharing that blogs encourage.
Is there a solution? Not really, just an ongoing balancing act between privacy and openness, and the answers are going to be different for many. For me, the solution has been limited sharing, only on topics that I am willing to discuss openly. Many of my thoughts remain utterly private, but that’s a reflection of my comfort level, and does not mean anyone else is making a mistake in being more open.
Great post. I think about this topic offline and online. When I left my old job, I realized two things as I was walking out the door: 1) was that I was happy to be leaving and 2) I had shared way too much of myself with people I wasn’t necessarily planning to maintain a relationship with. And it got me to wondering why. I think it’s because we are social creatures and no matter what is going on in our lives, we have a need to share and be heard. Sometimes it’s for empathy and sometimes it’s because we need a pat on the back. The one thing I wanted to avoid with this new job was sharing myself with the people around me, yet, I find myself talking about my kids, my husband, etc. Nothing bad, just the normal day-to-day things. And I think that’s ok. It helps to create a sense of community. In the virtual world, we have an even stronger need to bond because we don’t see each other f2f. I don’t think you should put your whole life on blast in a blog, but I think it’s perfectly acceptable to share an engagement, the birth of a baby, an illness or a promotion. There are life events that require support and I hope that you and others in this community will continue to share.
Francine’s blog
I very much liked what you had to say. I started blogging this year. I had recently received a cochlear implant and wanted to find others with simalar experiences.
Sorry I’m so late to the comment party, but, you know. The periodic posts I wrote for ACRLog this year have been my toe in the pool of blogging (thanks for the push, Meredith), but for all the reasons mentioned above I’m going to have to go full time on my own this fall. Once our Baby 2.0 arrives in late August and I’m away from work for a few months, I’m sure I’ll feel quite distanced from the rest of the real and library worlds. I’m hoping that full-time blogging will both help me cope with doubled parental duties as well as being removed from the day to day personal interaction with libraries while I’m on daddy sabbatical. The other library bloggers will have to be my connection from home to the professional side of my life that’s on hold. And I’m sure I’ll talk about the kids as well.
That’s a good assessment and insightful entry. Blogging is sharing self with the rest of the world and connecting with like minded people. Hence that’s why I have several blogs… even still not even within the range of your reputation… but as a mover and shaker you can influence people… so that is a good thing right?
I think the world needs movers and shakers too. i usually end up telling my story of my cochlear implaint… since the whole ordeal of getting it and not being able to have a lot of people who personally went through it.
I just started blogging this past Wednesday and feel like I am a larger part of the library world as a result. In fact, my partner was surprised that I wasn’t already blogging because I love writing and regularly author personal journal entries.
In addition, I was starting to read blogs more often and respond to posts. It felt good to have my opinions out there in the comments but without a blog of my own, there was not a way to make my own voice heard in one particular place. Thus, the blog.
I also opened a Facebook account this week and have connected with some people that I know from library school. I’m pretty vocal on the college bulletin board and now I am merely extending this to Facebook.
The use of the term “bulletin board” reminds me that it was 20 years ago when I first started posting on boards. Blogging is a logical step from what I (and many others) started years, even decades, ago.
Thanks for your post, Meredith.
[…] come across a few other librarians who have picked up on this thread, including, among others, Meredith at Information Wants to Be Free and Andrea at Library Techtonics, who has had a few good posts recently about how she uses social […]
[…] come across a few other librarians who have picked up on this thread, including, among others, Meredith at Information Wants to Be Free and Andrea at Library Techtonics, who has had a few good posts recently about how she uses social […]