by Flemming Funch
Joi Ito writes about the side-effects of having a blog that everybody reads."I've had blogger's block lately. As more people read my blog, I realize that I am writing for larger and larger audience. Just about every time I post something, I get thoughtful comments and email from a variety of perspectives. I realize that post early/post often is probably the best policy for blogging, but the rigor in which entries are discussed and the increasing percentage of people who I meet who have read my blog cause me to try to blog about things which are interesting yet not likely to cause me to spend a lot of time defending myself. The fact is, I'm becoming more and more conservative about what I blog. [...]
The problem with many blogs is that the audience includes so many different communities of people that it collapses the facets of one's identity and requires you to choose a rather shallow facet which becomes your public identity. For instance, I know that people in the US State Department, friends from my Chicago DJ days, my employees, my family, thoughtful conservatives from Texas, cypherpunk friends, foreign intelligence officers, Japanese business associates and close friends all read my blog occasionally. In real life, I present a very different facet of my identity to these different communities, but on my blog I have to imagine how all of them will react as a craft these entries. None of them get the depth that I am able to present when I am performing for them directly." He's right - that's a problem. I get nowhere near the number of readers he does, but I certainly notice that situation. My blog is read by a number of different classes of people that I otherwise wouldn't communicate to in the same way. I've gotten somewhat used to the fact that I can't completely keep them apart and that, on the Internet, if I've said something *anywhere* it might pop up just about anywhere else. But in my blog, despite that I choose what I want to say, it is difficult not to be somewhat self-conscious about how it will be received by different kinds of people. So, for myself, I notice that the result is that I become more conservative than I otherwise would be. I post stuff that I know I'd be able to defend. To people I work with, to my neighbors, to techies on the net, to people who think I belong to a certain philosophical tradition, to people who think I'm writing for a particular online community, to my mom. It is both cool that I can somewhat succeed in speaking in the same somewhat authentic voice to all of these people. And it is frustrating that it also becomes somewhat more guarded, shallow and academic than what I'd really like. I think it is probably overall a healthy process, but also one that it is hard to be completely satisfied with. And, luckily, blogging isn't the only way we have of communicating.
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