“I currently post comments on a fairly regular basis on four blogs.
Two are the blogs of total strangers. Mind you, the totality of their strangeness is reducing- one particularly blogs prolifically.”
There’s a weirdness that comes from reading other people’s deep expressions on a blog.
You become engaged and drawn in and you *feel* a connection. But there really isn’t a connection, because it’s only one sided. The feeling is there, but there’s nothing genuine backing it. You read something that has you emotionally fired up. But you don’t know the person and they don’t know you.
There are, I think, two sides to it. I once heard there are two sides to everything 
The Sharing Side
Traditionally, people build up conversation about deeply personal stuff relatively slowly and only with people they trust. People become acquaintances, and then social friends, and then good friends, and maybe best friends.
And then they talk about these things.
But now, we can record our innermost stuff on the internet! Nothing feels risky anymore, because there’s no immediate feedback to tell us we’ve done something unwise and possibly damaging. Hmm… I think I’ll say that again because it feels important.
Nothing feels risky anymore.
In the flesh and blood world, when you say something deeply personal in the wrong company, you know it. Immediately. Things get to that really awkward place really fast. I know. I’ve been there, on both sides. I don’t have to tell you this. You know. You’ve been there. On both sides.
When you post something online, you don’t get that feedback. People could be reading this very post and shuddering, and saying, “I’ll never speak to him again. Too much information! That was unspeakably awkward.” Probably not – but the point is, I don’t get to see them react that way. People could be feeling all warm and fuzzy. I don’t know.
The vast majority of people who read, don’t comment. The result is that when you post something like that… It doesn’t feel either catastrophic or heroic. The feeling of it is totally removed from the reality.
And so we’re led to make decisions we wouldn’t otherwise. Like sharing something that is best friend, pinky-swear material because we never know that it makes things awkward.
The Hearing Side
The hearing side weirdness is what happens when we browse our Facebook feed. We’re sitting there flipping through and we know everything that’s going on in all our friends’ lives. We feel connected. But we weren’t really part of any of those stories.
There’s that disconnect with reality again. We feel differently than we should. Welcome to Internet weirdness.
It happens when we see someone dumping their soul on a blog. It’s compelling.
We don’t really know how to respond, because the messages we’re receiving are contradicting one another. On the one hand, we’re reading pinky-swear stuff – it’s a real best friend level interaction. On the other hand, it’s coming from a complete stranger.
What exactly is the right and proper relationship? It doesn’t fit any pre-built boxes.
This is similar to Seth Godin’s “fake networking” - the illusion, and more importantly, the feeling of being connected, but without any genuine interchange of something worthwhile. Friendship is built on sacrifice and if you’ve only read someone’s blog, there hasn’t been any yet.
That’s why conversation is important. That’s why the exchange (and not just consumption) of worthwhile thoughts and feelings is important. That’s why commenting is valuable. It grounds people. It gives people something that, while not as effective as a face to face conversation, is suddenly far more real than just reading.
People can build real friendships this way. We’ve done it through letters in the past. There are still limitations, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make this medium work for us.
We will adapt, and we will eventually arrive at a social approach that works – that isn’t awkward or inappropriate, that is sustainable and not viewed as all-sufficient.
I bet it will have better feedback mechanisms though.
Yes- all you Lurkers out there- step up to the plate and comment!
Hear! Hear! Someone might even build on your comments for their next blog. How affirmative is that, I asks ya?
Very nice indeed.
This post isn’t to deny the value of being strictly a producer or a consumer.
Authors write books – I read them – and no relationship is desired or expected. And yet… It is still a very good thing.
But if I was expecting to find connectedness in a book I would be disappointed.
This is what Dean Allen hit upon. People were coming to his site looking for connectedness that he knew (knew!) it couldn’t deliver. So he took it down because he didn’t feel right serving people a counterfeit.
Your post seems to have scrambled my brain a little–I never met CSLewis, yet somehow I feel I knew him. Doesn’t happen with books you say — I don’t know.
On another tangent, no matter how deep the dark secret that’s revealed, do we really know anyone–do we even know ourselves? I suspect there’s a reason why the very word, “person,” comes from a Greek theatrical term for mask.
My words were sloppy. Relationships exist everywhere, but some are weird. Talking to CS Lewis would be very strange indeed: I having shared nothing and he, all.
If we can’t know people, we can’t know anything. We can’t know people in totality perhaps, but the part we know, we know. Masks are everywhere… but they come down, sometimes.
Innocent *lurker* enjoying a read suddenly gets challenged by author and commentators to question that passive read. Said *lurker* accordingly writes thoughtful response:
The written word is a filter. It is a powerful medium, perhaps because it creates distance as much as it reduces distance; because you can share deep parts of yourself, but in a carefully scripted, artfully sculpted way. (You can even talk about yourself in the third person). When you write, no one knows if your voice squeaks when you are unsure of yourself, or if you slurp your hot drinks noisily, or what makes you laugh impusively in a movie, or if you really do have body odor. So you can *dump your soul* to an audience, but the distance created by the medium of writing acts as a buffer protecting both you and your reader from awkwardness. Yet this buffer also prevents you from really knowing a person. I am learning from personal experience that no matter how frequent and intimate written exchange between two people may be, it cannot even begin to subsitute the power of face-to-face communication or the bond created by sharing daily life in person.
Thus here lies the paradox: in spite of the buffer created by writing- in fact because of it- there remains an element of risk precisely because your readers don’t know you. “Who are they going to think that I am? What will they misread between the lines? What won’t they read between the lines?”
A final thought: unlike the sound waves of speech, the written word does not disappear into nothingness upon expression. Which adds to both its power AND risk.
Thanks for the thoughtful response!
You bring up an excellent point about the limitations of writing. A person is not the sum of their written text.
At various times I have been surprised at how strongly voice can come through writing . I remember wandering into a professor’s office once and glancing at his whiteboard.
I was shocked to realize that I would have recognized that whiteboard as *his*, anywhere.
It’s worth bringing up that there is a vast difference between reading the writing of a stranger and reading the writing of someone *you already know*.
In both cases, you fill in the gaps (tone, emotion, meaning, etc) but in one case you do so far more accurately.
So while some writing may definitely be considered close and intimate, perhaps it is a wealth of previous tangible experience which closes the distance, and not the writing itself.
Still, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement. I think as a culture, we largely haven’t explored the category of social writing – writing dealing with personal stories and emotions as a means of building relationship – we were never taught it in school.
Previously, we haven’t had the distributed communities that the internet seems to be fostering – we’ve never experienced the same kind of pressure to express ourselves in text. We’ve never had the dependency on letter writing (in its various blog/e-mail/twitter forms) that we’re now discovering.
Or, I just need to get out more