When I first started blogging people weren’t really blogging. There were a few of us (Jennifer was my first virtual friend blogging and she was way before me and Aimee was an early blogroll edition thanks to Becca). But there wasn’t this huge community and there weren’t “blog mavens” or consultants or advertising co-ops. Blogging was something you could do and reasonably expect that most people in the world would have no idea how to find you or your blog.
You need to understand that this was before google was a verb.
So when I started blogging with my full name and my kid’s name (only one kid then), it was a little edgy but it was so far out of the mainstream that it just didn’t matter. Like sometimes people would bring it up at picnics or at parties and people would say, “A blog? What’s a blog? You write a journal online?”
Blogging got me some of my very first writing jobs because I was fortunate enough to be building an online presence when people were building online media outlets. I met other early adopters and some of them had editorial control at these new fangled “Online Magazines” and they read my blog and offered me gigs so there was a clear impetus to keep blogging as me, Dawn Friedman, writer. (I can think of several people who — like myself — owe their editorial careers to the internet because we had some lucky foresight and got there when things were still young and so you could create a site and sell it to AOL who would then sell it to Oprah’s new production company and those of us who rode the wave suddenly had very useful clips whereas before we were just hopeful that an online byline might mean something — anything — to an actual print magazine editor.)
Then the internet grew and became essential for many if not most of us; not just bloggers any longer either but people who appreciated the ease of use of other social media (even my inlaws are on Facebook now, for crying out loud). The publicness of life online became less insulated and more OUT THERE, invading our real world in ways that I did not anticipate when I started my lowly, hand-coded in HTML blog on kjsl.com. (A free website that I got for being on one of the attachment parenting litservs where I first met Jennifer and Katie and several other early adapters who are part of my social media circle although I left that email list probably a decade ago.)
Again, as a writer this worked. In fact, it was absolutely necessary. If you head to any writer’s conference, open any writer’s magazine or show up at any writer’s group people have long been talking about the necessity of being online. My blog still gets me jobs directly (through assignments from editors who read me) and indirectly (through readers who pass my name on to people I know). It is part of the tired buzzword “platform”, which basically is defined as a writer’s ability to alert potential readers to her work.
There is the crux of my dilemma — I don’t want to stop writing because I will always be a writer so I can’t just close up shop and quit having a presence. How then do I shift that presence to allow me the freedom to do other things (namely be a counselor) off-line? How do I prepare to maintain the appropriate boundaries for transference when I have been virtually an open book? And how do I do this while still nurturing my writing career?
I’m headed to a clearer path about this though since I’ve been thinking on it since I sent in my application for my GRE (but didn’t dare think about it for real ’til I got the acceptance to a program).
This is what I know for sure: I liked the challenge of writing that disruption article, (which should be on news stands any minute) and it cemented my yearning to do more nonfiction that isn’t directly related to my life. I have loved writing essays and I will continue writing personal essays but the truth of it is that my focus on that has been due to the reality of my life, which has been very small and inner-focused because I haven’t had the space or time to go out and do any reporting. I mean, there’s a reason why every couple of years you get a slew of new memoirs about new motherhood. When I went to the Nieman Conference (for writers of nonfiction) a few years back, I left feeling both excited and discouraged. Excited because I knew I wanted to stretch myself as a writer and discouraged because I knew it would be a few years before I could do it. But my kids are bigger now and one reason I want to be in school and want to have a career that is not writing-focused is that I want a base that lets me research things that are of interest to me but are not OF me.
When I imagine blogging with these goals I’m still in the process of shaping I think it will be an awful lot like this entry, which is to say it’ll be personal but not the same kind of personal (less vulnerable) and it’ll also (I hope) be more about the things that I’m learning (like Harlow’s Monkey only I can only dream of attaining her awesomeness). And I do want to blog about the reality of grad school when you’re forty-ish and have kids and maybe even are fool enough to keep homeschooling them like we hope to do.
Now the hard part is taking the plunge to start dismantling my archives because dismantling them means making a definitive shift from marketing myself as a writer who will write just about any darn thing and is practically focused on quantity although she yearns to be focused on quality and marketing myself as a more select kind of writer. Which is why I decided to find another way to support myself but which scares me since I’ve been marketing like crazy now for several years and old habits die hard.
See, one reason my blog ends up at the top of searches is that it is HUGE and it is deeply entangled on the world wide web. To dismantle it means to take down these connections, which hurts my “platform.” (And my platform was already hurting because the rise of blogging and then the fall of blogging due to the rise of social networking means my blog has taken a double hit lately.) The reason I’m at the top of this list? Because my archives are large and well indexed (i.e., linked up on search engines).
It is a largely symbolic issue though. I need to get over it and not care if I drop off those lists entirely. Again, old habits die hard, people and my habits are pretty old now.
The Public Blog
It’s ironic that a discussion about how much I blog the kids should open up in my comments since friends and I have been talking about this very thing in regards to another mom who blogs more freely than I do. I look askance at her and some of you look askance at me. No blogging parent is unaware of the controversy of blogging about your kids and we all of us talk about it fairly regularly; it does not come as a surprise to me that some of you come by and shake your heads in dismay.
Last night we were watching Back to the Future. I was fifteen when that movie came out and that was 25 years ago. Now to give you some perspective, Marty McFly is about 17 in that movie and he goes back in time 30 years. In other words, my teen years are almost as old fashioned and quaint now as Marty’s parents’ time was in that movie. Oh lord, I am getting old.
I remember when the film premiered and the critics — most of them nostalgic for their own teen years — waxed on about how perfectly they nailed the time. The obsequious gas station attendants in bowties and hats; the kid bouncing along the town square sidewalk with springs on his feet, the novelty of watching Jackie Gleason during dinner. But now I watch and I’m getting nostalgic myself. Brett says, “I had a puffy vest like that!” And I say, “God, do you remember those jeans?” Not to mention the flash of homesickness I had at seeing Marty’s calculator watch even though I never had (or wanted) one. Remember that? Remember the discussions we had about whether or not learning math would be obsolete because we could wear calculating machines on our wrists? Then Doc says he dreams of going 25 years into the future, which puts him right around now. (I haven’t seen the sequel but now I want to just to see how close they got to predicting things for the new millennium.)
While Al Gore and whoever made this video may have predicted the future of the internet, most of us were way in the dark in the 80s and certainly no one could know that blogs and facebook and flickr were going to show up and turn our private lives into public fodder. We still don’t know how it’s going to end up. Our kids are going to navigate much more complex questions about their privacy and frankly I believe that our concept of Public/Private (our being my generation and older) is fundamentally different than it will be for kids growing up today. When Marty tossed his walkman into the passenger seat of the delorean, Noah asked, “Is that his phone?” While we, his parents, were latecomers to the cell phone revolution (and still don’t use them much) to Noah they have always been there. His is a world where teenagers at our potluck text each other even when they’re sitting side by side (so the parents can’t overhear), where kids have digital cameras built right into their handheld video games and where, yes, their parents have been recording their lives online since they were crawling. (About half of Noah’s friends’ parents have blogs and all of them have facebooks.) Heck, I look at what Pennie shares in her online life and call her up to give her my ancient point of view and she laughs because even just 14 years apart, our experiences with the internet are fundamentally different.
I don’t know which of our concerns will hold true and which won’t. I don’t know what this incredible amount of information on the internet will mean for our kids. I don’t know if the sheer weight of it will render it neutral or if kids like mine will be showing up at support groups, “My Mother Had a Blog”. I don’t know. But you don’t either. None of us do. Back in the dark ages (the fifties) people were all hepped up about Elvis’s pelvis and now we laugh about their naivete. Maybe they’ll be laughing at us someday. Oh how quaint! Fearful of the internet! It’s hard to have hindsight for times you’ve never yet visited.
I get that some of my readers may look at me with the same shock and horror with which I look at, say, parents who put their kids on the Mickey Mouse Club. Although I have to say, if you are really bothered by what I write, please don’t read me. I don’t mean this in the snarky, “No one’s got a gun to your head!” way, I mean this in the life is too short to be annoyed by blogs way. There are lots of great blogs out there and many of them share way less than I do so read them and be happy. Why read mine to get pissed off? But then, it’s your right to be pissed off by my blog, too, and even to comment your criticism. I will push your comments through although whether or not I address your concerns will depend on my mood.
Speaking of comments, one commenter left a very critical comment and then said, “I know you probably won’t publish this (actually, please don”t)” so I didn’t but listen, I DO NOT only publish nice comments. The ONLY comment I have ever deleted — outside of obvious spam — is one that was totally anti-semitic and ranting and not in anyway connected to any content on the blog. I have never banned people on my blog and have no plans to do it. I do not and will not begin deleting comments that have a relevant point even if that point is annoying to me. I don’t always engage with negative commenters because I don’t like to have internet arguments that will clearly go nowhere. But I leave those comments because 1) you may be speaking for other readers, (which is what I think happened with this last post — one person expressed her disapproval and it gave some other commenters the freedom to comment for the first time expressing theirs); 2) I believe commenters co-create blogs, which is something I’ve written about; 3) it’d be hypocritical and dishonest to only leave the nice comments up.
Now if comments become insanely abusive like they have on some people’s other blogs, like people start posting, “You should die in a fiery crash because you’re dumb” I’d likely spam those because that’s not really a dialogue but so far (knock wood) I haven’t had those people come out of the woodwork. If I do, I’d spam ‘em because that’s clearly just crazy talk and not someone actually weighing in thoughtfully on the conversation.