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December 19, 2004
Public and Private Lives in the Blogosphere
As I posted earlier, blogs both allow and force us to delineate the boundaries of our public and private lives. Today's New York Times Magazine has an article on this very point. I am six days ahead of that particular curve and dangerously behind on my final paper of the semester.
Posted by Underblog at 9:02 AM | Comments (1)
December 14, 2004
Baby It's Cold
Often, the first thing that people learn about Minnesota is that it gets cold here. This morning, according to Yahoo! Weather, it is 7 degrees Fahrenheit outside. It was supposed to have gotten down as low as 4 in these parts, but the heat-island effect probably came to our rescue. In anyone's book, 7 degrees is cold. The funny thing is that it felt a lot colder yesterday, when the temperature (according to Biscuits&Gravy's thermometer) was 16 to 18 degrees.
The difference was the wind. Yesterday, the cold front blew in at a steady 20 miles per hour or so. It is unusual when everyone chooses to use the covered section of the Washington Avenue bridge. That is, everyone except the bicycles, who would have had to dodge all the pedestrians.
Today, the wind is calm. Yesterday, my cheeks went numb in the three minutes the dog took to do her morning business. Today, 7 degrees felt positively balmy. Not that I am going to be raking the leaves that blew out of the beds where we had neglected to rake them any time soon.
Posted by Underblog at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)
December 3, 2004
The Obligatory Self-Referential Blog Entry
NB: I entered this as a comment on another blog, but thought it reflected enough "content" to bear reposting here [how vain!]:
I confess that I'm having to adjust to the fact that my bro, his wife, and now my mother may sometimes read this blog.
People with blogs have to deal with the idea of a "public persona," often for the first time.
A friend of mine recently started a blog but has not shared the fact of its existence with me (yet). [She later let me in on it, or rather gave permission for its url to be made to be known to me.]
We bothered a friend to start a blog and he did; his daughter has a blog as well. They decided it would be better for both of them if they did not link up as "friends" in the LJ [LiveJournal] scheme. This to me seems very odd, especially since LJ users can add anyone they like as a friend without permission from the linkee.
Part of the attraction of having a blog is sharing those intimate feelings we have but only with people we don't know. Of course, wives, friends, and family all find out sooner or later. Dooce does a pretty good job revealing the things that trouble her in her own life (including an incredible tale of severe depression) while making the content interesting enough that people keep reading. Blogs allow us to express what we consider to be at universal or transcendent experiences. The fact that we can connect with people who know us only by our public person tempts bloggers to create an "alternative personality" for the blog. I suppose that we all do create alternate online personas to some extent, since it is impossible to share everything with the world. However, when friends are in on the secret it becomes hard to limit our newly minted public personas to what we want to put out there. On the other hand, letting friends and family in on the secret encourages us to be more honest and forces us to reflect upon our experiences intelligibly if not objectively.
Posted by Underblog at 3:36 PM | Comments (7)