Amy's Robot

Oh my god I totally hate my mom

The Washington Post today analyzes the therapeutic nature, and occasional traumas, of posting your most personal thoughts on a website that is accessible to everybody in the entire universe. Yes, there are some people out there who do blogs chronicling their daily activities, the fights they get in with their boss, their intimate and gruesome medical procedures, their romantic developments, and, in the case of teenage girls, how much they totally cannot STAND their mothers. For some reason, cat wallpaper figures into many such blogs.

In a nice meta-touch, the Post uses Technorati to link to a list of blogs that link to the article, many of which fall into the aforementioned personal diary category.

Of course, the article also mentions a number of hospitals that have found that very sick people find comfort and community in sharing their experiences with other distant people who are going through similar treatments. There is certainly value in using the internet to find these other people.

But people. This is the internet. The whole world is reading your diary. The WaPo article says, "Some bloggers are unprepared for the attention and don't realize that what seems to be a disposable medium is anything but." If you think back through your life, there are probably at least a few people out there you might not want to know about how you made out with your ex-girlfriend in her boyfriend's car, or that you've been really depressed about your future lately, or the raging party you're having next weekend.

And: your parents can read your blog.

So even if you might think you want to read about the predilections, favorite ice cream flavors, hypothetical baby names, drinking stories, freaky dreams, illegal fetishes, suicide attempts, and emoticons of Emily, ADM, and I, sorry. You're stuck with ugly celebrity pictures and posts about TV. - Amy

categories: Culture, Media
posted by amy at 4:12 PM | #