With Censors Like These…

It is striking trend: while our private existence is intentionally flaunted on various social networks, blogging has come to suffer from deliberate self-censorship. When did we start writing capital letters for the initials of people in our lives, or come up with clever pseudonyms for the same? I often think that internet needs no censorship; we’re actively learning how to censor ourselves – sometimes stopping mid-sentence only to go back and erase what we have said or even practice retrospective deleting that which at a later point in time seemed like it didn’t need to be said or that having been said *somebody* might take offense – in this process there is the fear that uninhibited writing will go out of style entirely. What was the point with blogging to begin with? Was it not to say what we think, to express ourselves, to connect, to socialize our experience of what it means to be human? With time, we learned to display a fragmented life: certain chunks may be recorded, others we ourselves make the choice not to share. Supposedly we have freedom of speech in the western world; when you’re reading a blog, however, what remains to speak freely of is only ourselves. Yet, to be human is to be constantly immersed in a social context – we are sentenced to a life among others – by circumscribing what we say about contexts not solely involving ourselves, we have come to excell at precisely that which many dictatorships failed to perfecr before us. We cannot say what we wish to say and we refrain from saying what we actually mean; instead, blogging has become the embodiment of a constant fear of stepping on someone else’s toes. The fear of the internet is looming large over contemporary life – polemics is allowed to a certain point, but never from a personal point of view, but merely as a disinterested pastime [or professional, but that has nothing to do with the private sphere]. What we are documenting is not life as it was at this point in time, but life as we feel it should be represented in public writing. I have written previously about contemporary culture’s affectionate relationship with displays of ‘joy’ and ‘happiness’ as the standard for public writing, because if there is anything else – mainly life constitutes of the something else – blame comes into play and when there’s blame it must certainly be directed at *someone*. Unfortunately, I am no better than anyone else when it comes to this. I always make a highly conscious choice as to what to include and what to exclude from my blog; the fragmented picture I paint for my readers bear little resemblance to what my life – and, most importantly, my thoughts – look like. It is of course good that we care about each other for else we would be barbarians but aren’t we loosing a huge chunk of our reality by not depicting ALL of it? For whom are we writing, anyway? Who is our implied reader? Why do we feel a need at all to write publicly about our lives, to pick selected passages from it, shape them so as to fit neatly into a given form and then impose it onto the outside world? What is the point of a blog to begin with? Was it not to take control of the written word, to make it personal, to rid ourselves of the editor, of selected publication, and bringing the right to say what we think to each and everyone of us? Thoughts like these always arise in my mind when something of importance happens in my life. More often than not, these events involve other people. I would have wanted to be able to write my blog as a kind of diary – but this genre can’t function when the reader intended is not the same as the writer behind the words. Blogging becomes dangerous in a world where everything can and will be googled. Even now, as I’m writing this, I wonder silently to myself: “What if somebody reads this and disagrees? What if I step over the limit and say something that shouldn’t have been said? What if someone takes offense? Wouldn’t it be better at the end of the day to just write something cheerful about the day that is almost over now, to make a few happy-go-lucky generalisations and be done with it?” I don’t have the answers to these questions; I only know that they are always with me. The need to write about my life, to put into words what I’m thinking at the moment, is also always with me. I would like to have a forum where I can speak about events so as to try and make sense of them, to conceptualize previous experience and draw some conclusions. But this is not always allowed and I have also perfected the act of self-censorship throughout the years. Sometimes I want to just say “it’s only a blog!” like Bridget said “it’s only a diary!”, but just like Bridget knew it wasn’t just a diary – for it was really a novel – I know a blog is so much more than just a blog – it is a public forum, where the reader is always thought of long before she has even opened the browser and started scanning the page for what seems the most interesting. For example, at least once every day a stranger on the street gives me a compliment regarding my looks. Sometimes when I’m crossing the street in San Francisco the random person next to me will take a closer look at me and say something like “wow, you’re beautiful.” Documenting this reality on my blog is not an option – my readers will see me as a shallow person who is full of herself – yet, it is a huge part of my human experience. Always being aware of that someone is watching me, taking in the way I look, evaluating it against their standards of beauty, and then coming up with an affirmative estimation – that is something I have to live with. Every single day of my life. I do know the effect I have on men. It is a conscious choice not to let it rule my existence but to view it as something that just happens. Over and over again. But this was not exactly my point – I had another point entirely, but I can’t write about it because it doesn’t fit the reader intended. I wish I could intend another reader but the truth is that you cannot invent your own reader. You may invent your own author – I think I’ve invented a good author for this blog [not to be confused with the actual me who is similar but differs significantly in the way that I am a complete human individual who think things that aren’t always PC and sometimes think things that are of interest to nobody except myself] – but the reader always chooses this role without any influence from the author what so ever. What I feel is that our documentation of contemporary life is left incomplete because we’ve become so good at censoring ourselves [inititally I wanted to put a ‘damn’ in there but as I remembered that my invented author doesn’t swear publicly, I censored myself in advance]. What I realized as of late is that a tragedy happened and I was its witness – perhaps I even played a minor part in it but I will probably never know for sure – but I chose not to see, not to witness it, to refrain from acknowledging it going on. The signs were clear – retrospectively I can pick out certain events, even dates, when the tragedy was right next to me – but I stood on the sidelines and closed my eyes. It is the kind of tragedy worthy of an Ingmar Bergman movie; if I were ever to tell the story of it; it would probably seem as unlikely as everything else that I do not speak publicly about. What is reality, anyway? Is it not our own construct? Is not life what we make it to seem? If there was any set standard for life then we wouldn’t have to depict it, display it, represent it – over and over again. We’re always inventing ourselves. Now, we have come to invent ourselves as we want to be seen by others. Blogging has nothing to do with life ‘as it is.’ If life is anything, it is nothing like what you find in blogs. Life is messy and in this mess we touch each other, we depend on each other, we influence each other, we belong to each other – yet, none of this we can admit because everything you say can and will be googled against you.

These were the thoughts I had today and shared today.