On "The Glut of Personal Blogs"

     As to the time-wasting issue, while I have never claimed that my own blog is worthy of serious attention, there are many that are. Dan Vance and Rod Lewis spring to mind as presenters of cohesive, well-written, and constructive personal blogs. Thankfully the article acknowledges these to some degree along with “professional” blogs - yet not every piece of communication I engage in must be high-minded Shakespearean discourse. To say that communication on low topics is a “waste of time” indicts our personal conversations more often than our blogs , and how is “wasting time” on a private diary any better than “wasting time” on an online diary? Again, it must be taken as an indictment of the author and content rather than the medium.

     The claim that it is “the ultimate in personal vanity” to blog about our daily lives is specious. When I post on the blog, I have no illusions that my life is of interest to the world. However, I do know that my life is of interest to many of my friends, and theirs to mine. Especially as an alumnus, I have found Xanga to be a wonderful and efficient tool to keep up with friends across the world. No one intentionally posts things they think are uninteresting or insignificant. The article also seems to ignore the fact that no blog has a captive audience - no one is being forced to read anything they deem a waste of time.

     The article also seems to show an inherent misunderstanding of the generational differences reflected in this phenomenon. While my parents would never consider posting anything of a personal nature on the internet, our generation is happy to do so. Our idea of privacy, both practically and legally, is significantly more open than our parents’. We are interested in a dialogue about things that are important to us, and this kind of outward-ness is one of our generation’s great strengths. We have no illusions that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and are happy to seek input and support. We are quite good at sharing and listening in a way that I think is lost on earlier generations in this country. This is not to say that a blog is a good place to confess our sins one to another, and certainly is not to say it is a good place to vent our frustrations and attack people behind the relative anonymity of the computer - but I think it does help shed light on a source of blogging’s popularity.

     This generational difference, this need for openness, is something that Cedarville University seems to handle well. Their president Dr. William Brown is a leading and active force on the campus blogring, and even a cursory glance will display the love and care that exists between him and the student body. The relationship between an administration, its faculty, and its students at a private university is admittedly a difficult one to juggle, but Dr. Brown seems to have dealt with this in a useful way and taken advantage of the many positives blogging has to offer: easy access to his students and they to him, a convenient and formatted place of dialogue, and an openness about his personal and professional life as an example to his community. This tack seems to have generated a positive response, where his students often reflect these same qualities in their blogging, and their blogring is not marred by the vitriol that our ring so often seems to contain. I have written to Dr. Brown and asked for his thoughts on this issue, and hope to be able to present those in the near future.

     An aspect of this issue the article left untouched that I believe warrants attention is that of the anonymous blogs. While I certainly find nothing morally or legally objectionable in their nature, I do rather despise the cowardice they reflect. As Nathan Clinebelle put it to me in one doozey of a sentence, “Useful pieces of anonymous journalism extrapolate their sources and the ramifications of their arguments, for the sake of context.” No anonymous CIU blog so far has met this criterion. Let me say that outside a Matthew 18 situation, if what you are saying is true, newsworthy, constructive, and presented in a Christian manner, then there should be no fear of retaliatory punishment from the university, and if there is then perhaps the university is not worth working at or attending.

     There are good arguments as to why blogging might be a negative influence on our generation, or specifically on CIU, but these issues run much deeper than the article chose to reach. The main problem I see with blogs is the way that they tend to be used to create a persona or image of ourselves that is not true to reality. One can appear smarter, funnier, or less troubled - one can present themselves in any light they see fit. Oddly enough, it’s even increasingly popular to present yourself as more troubled than you are. It makes relationships into stories - you can write them how you want. To some degree, it becomes writing yourself as you want the world to see you - a strange sort of personal promotion. The reason this seems less so for alumni is simply that Xanga becomes a tool to keep up with people they wouldn't be in contact with otherwise. It is a poor replacement for real-life interaction, yes - yet this poverty is true of any form of long-distance communication. On top of this, people use Xanga to say things to others that they would never say in real life, which is always a warning sign to attend to in written communication.

     Another significant problem with Xanga blogs is that they tend to promote defining ourselves in a decidedly negative postmodern manner. This is true in our daily lives as well, as we analyze people by what DVDs they own, what books they read, or what clothes they wear. Each time I post, I’m asked what media I’m currently consuming, but it never asks what I contribute. And what I create defines me infinitely better than what I consume.

     I believe Christians in general should share our struggles and burdens with others more than we do - I even think the confession box is a good idea from that standpoint.  In the case of blog confessions though, not only is it too public a forum, but it seems somehow a lesser confession. Confession is ultimately a great act of shared worship. When I confess to a person face to face, mouth to ear, that healing is far greater than blogging it to the wind. In this instance, the internet would make something hard and profitable, easy.

     Ian North had this to say while attending Moody Bible Institute: “Xanga is a way to say things we would not share conversationally because of their depth or difficulty. People at Moody deal with bitterness and sin and pain on Xanga that you never see in their day-to-day interactions. It may be a healthy way to sit down and line it all up, or it may be a sign of the deficiency of dialogue and openness with the evangelical subculture. I have no idea which.”

     I think both Ian's ideas are spot-on for different people, but I'm afraid that in general it leans too far toward the latter. Many people seem to feel obligated to post “insightfully,” and therefore in a revelatory manner. Clearly there are some things which should be shared only with those closest to you, and some things should be shared only with God. I forget which professor of mine told of his wife's journal, which is the only thing he doesn't read of hers or know of her. It is a place for her to talk to God - and that seems healthy. Yet I know the first case is true as well: through this medium people can quickly gain insight from a wide variety of friends with unique perspectives.

     One of the major failures of internet communication (and apparently campus newspapers) is that only people with the most polarizing opinions tend to care enough to post on an issue, and the reasonable middle ground is easily missed. The bottom line is that personal blogs can obviously be used well or poorly, like any other medium. What may be a means for cowardly attacks for one group may be a means for encouragement to another. What may be a sinful addiction for a gossip-hungry blogger may be a lifeline of contact and support between an overseas missionary and their friends. As ever, let us consider the issue even-handedly, with a sober judgment of both the good and the bad.

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