Why People Blog

Roger Ebert finds his voice

Roger Ebert, profiled in Esquire magazine, keeps a blog at the Chicago Sun-Times that has become his voice now that he has lost his physical one. It’s a moving piece about Ebert’s life today since his lost his voice to cancer and complications that ensued from cancer treatment.

I point the Esquire article out here because of this paragraph about Ebert’s blog:

There are places where Ebert exists as the Ebert he remembers. In 2008, when he was in the middle of his worst battles and wouldn’t be able to make the trip to Champaign-Urbana for Ebertfest—really, his annual spring festival of films he just plain likes—he began writing an online journal. Reading it from its beginning is like watching an Aztec pyramid being built. At first, it’s just a vessel for him to apologize to his fans for not being downstate. The original entries are short updates about his life and health and a few of his heart’s wishes. Postcards and pebbles. They’re followed by a smattering of Welcomes to Cyberspace. But slowly the journal picks up steam, as Ebert’s strength and confidence and audience grow. You are the readers I have dreamed of, he writes. He is emboldened. He begins to write about more than movies; in fact, it sometimes seems as though he’d rather write about anything other than movies. The existence of an afterlife, the beauty of a full bookshelf, his liberalism and atheism and alcoholism, the health-care debate, Darwin, memories of departed friends and fights won and lost—more than five hundred thousand words of inner monologue have poured out of him, five hundred thousand words that probably wouldn’t exist had he kept his other voice. Now some of his entries have thousands of comments, each of which he vets personally and to which he will often respond. It has become his life’s work, building and maintaining this massive monument to written debate—argument is encouraged, so long as it’s civil—and he spends several hours each night reclined in his chair, tending to his online oasis by lamplight. Out there, his voice is still his voice—not a reasonable facsimile of it, but his.

This is blogging at its most powerful and effective, when it connects the blogger with the audience in ways that simply weren’t possible before.

Read the Esquire article, and check out Ebert’s blog.

How much should you share online?

Emily Gould has written a lengthy piece for the New York Times’ Sunday Magazine about her time as a writer for the gossip blog Gawker. The piece, titled “Exposed” is something of an exploration of how far you can go with sharing your private life on a blog, and the lives of others.

In it, Gould says:

The will to blog is a complicated thing, somewhere between inspiration and compulsion. It can feel almost like a biological impulse. You see something, or an idea occurs to you, and you have to share it with the Internet as soon as possible.

I’m often asked about privacy concerns when it comes to blogging. Many people describe privacy concerns as a generational thing and generalize broadly to say that younger people are happy putting up pictures of themselves and those in their lives on Facebook, or posting their thoughts about sex, relationships, and jobs in their personal blogs; older people aren’t. It really isn’t that simple, however, and like Gould has done, sometimes you may find out what your own comfort limits are only by crossing them.

For me, the guideline is this: I will put online—in any online space, regardless of password protection or site membership requirements—information I would feel comfortable sharing with a friendly stranger I speak to on the street. Would I be willing to show someone like that the photos I had taken for publicity purposes? Of course, and I’m also happy for that person to get a glimpse into my interest in knitting, travels, and life via the photos I share on Flickr. Am I OK with sharing my professional background and experience online? Yep, and I do that on LinkedIn. How about Facebook? That social networking site has spaces for me to tell people about my interests, relationship status, and the books I’m reading, and yes, I’m happy for pretty much anyone to have access to that stuff. By most standards I’m pretty open. What I don’t share online—anywhere online—are the private details of my life. The things I might share with one or two close friends in conversation, or that I might perhaps only tell my husband. (That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Well, lots of people share everything.) I don’t blog about my friends much at all, their trips, travails, employers, and so on—even if that information seems innocuous, it isn’t my information to share. I don’t blog about my health, I rarely blog about my politics, and I never, on any site, use information that could be used for identity theft, like my date of birth, government identification numbers, and so on. For 10 years, this wavy line in the sand has worked for me, at least so far as I know.

So I’m curious, where do you draw the line? And why do you draw it where you do?

Why People Blog: To Lose Weight

File this one in the category of interesting reasons people chose to blog: a CNN story today explains how a women used blogging to help lose weight.

Writer drops 168 pounds, blogs to inspire others
In February 2005, Bering was finally ready to do something about it. Never one to join a club or like big crowds, she decided to join Weight Watchers online. She also started walking at the track at a local university. At first, she walked a mile and then a mile and a half, two miles and eventually she completed a 5K in 38 minutes.

But Bering said the one thing that’s helped her most is her blog.

The thing I like best about this story is that there really isn’t a story here at all: I don’t think we’re really so hard up for news that “woman loses weight gradually” ought to make CNN. The news “hook” here is that blogging helped her lose the weight.

And if that’s the news hook, then the real point the story is making is: blogs can be used for something besides narcissistic navel-gazing while wearing pajamas during the middle of the day. Woah.