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

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.

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.

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.

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.