I’ve always found the process of how we decide what to say and what to ‘hold back’ in different situations and interactions with people quite intriguing. Obviously, one would say different things – and in a different way – to friends at a dinner party, or in the pub, than at a formal business meeting. The difference between those situations is obvious, but what about the ‘in-betweens’?
Since I started this blog in October last year, this has come into sharp focus for me – what would I write about and what would I hold back – and for what reasons? facebook was another area where this self-censorship was getting interesting for a while. I do not have my contacts there split up in groups – I semi-consciously decided against that, deciding that it might be interesting to break down the way we compartmentalize our life and relationships ‘offline’. Among my facebook friends are people I’ve been friends with since I was a kid, some family, former colleagues and Antarcticans, friends from my PhD days, an ex boyfriend, my husband, and some random acquaintances. A few of these people are gay, others have up to five children, many are academics, lots have progressive or very left-leaning political opinions while others have quite strong religious or politically conservative views. For a long time, when I wanted to post a link, I would ask myself ‘is this going to offend anyone’?
It’s been a few months now that I’ve been ruthless and just putting out there what I think. So, just a quick note: if you’re my facebook friend and I post something you don’t like, just ignore it – or, if you’re really offended, maybe we don’t ‘fit’ together anyway. And if you don’t like what I write on my blog – well, it’s just a blog: go somewhere else!
This decision is rather liberating. Of course, to many of you this is such an obvious thing – there are many here on NN who have absolutely no qualms about posting just about anything, even when it’s maybe a little half-baked (sorry Richard, I had to pick an example!). Interestingly, these posts often seem to lead to a good number of comments. That’s one of those things blogs are for – they provide the liberty to throw things out there and ‘have it out’ with lots of different, sometimes random people who stop by. Blogs are like an amplified conversation and, depending on the topic, this can be a joking conversation ‘down the pub’ or (as has been known to happen here on NN occasionally) a conversation that might have happened during a break at a scientific meeting – but with a lot more people and, another very important point, people that work in different disciplines.
If I had to pick one word to describe blogs, it would be diversity. Despite the noise, babble, careless banter or contentious outrage that is of course also out there, this is what makes blogs so incredibly interesting and potentially useful.
This diversity is also why blogs and science go so well together – if you write about your scientific interests or about challenges you are facing in your research, you never know what may come back to get your brain juice going, or who – and from what discipline, and thus perspective – this input will come from. Where else would scientists from so many different backgrounds meet and chat, or have constructive discussions, on this scale?
Openness – and the willingness to just ‘throw things out there’, even if you think yourself that your idea may just be completely off the wall or loony – are essential to make this work. I’ve been trying to train myself in this, and I have now posted a number of things with which I thought I may be leaning myself out of the window too far and for which I was nervous to hit the ‘publish’ button – but, overall, the feedback on those posts has actually been quite interesting.
Oh, and keep English libel law out of science (and blogging, please!).
What a great post! I hope you submit it to the science blogging book. You sum up so well both the personal issues facing the new blogger, which I remember struggling with myself – and the reasons why science blogging, in particular, works (and occasionally, doesn’t!).
I particularly identify with this paragraph, having made a similar journey myself:
It’s been a few months now that I’ve been ruthless and just putting out there what I think. So, just a quick note: if you’re my facebook friend and I post something you don’t like, just ignore it – or, if you’re really offended, maybe we don’t ‘fit’ together anyway. And if you don’t like what I write on my blog – well, it’s just a blog: go somewhere else!
This summary may sound self-evident to some, I don’t know, but it reflects very well the journey that one starts as a new blogger.
Thanks Maxine! It just all kind of fell into place this morning on my ride to work :)
Heh, no need to apologize. I tend to use this place to kick around half-baked ideas anyway. If they were fully-baked I’d be making money from them…
Thanks for the great post, Steffi. I am always careful to not mention my colleagues by name, but even so, an alert few of you may have noticed that I had to take at least one of my blog images down so as not to piss someone off. So I can’t subscribe completely to the ‘just putting anything up’ mentality. If a little self-censorship will make someone else’s day less hellish, it seems churlish not to. But I do wish, sometimes, that I didn’t feel bound by that. I blame my Midwestern American upbringing.
Hear, hear – great post. As Maxine says, it is a bit daunting at first but, like swimming in the north Atlantic, once you get accustomed to the water, it becomes a lot easier. And the most honest posts are very often the most interesting.
Jenny, you are completely right of course – and there is still a lot of stuff I’m not writing about (and probably never will), most of which is job-related. I would not post anything that would clearly and directly offend someone, or break an explicit or implicit rule of confidentiality. I don’t name names, and all of the people I have portrayed here have had the final say in what goes in the post, and often the wording.
What I am trying to do is to be open with my thoughts and ideas, and being honest about them, as Stephen alludes to. I’ve found that the results can be very intersting and stimulating!
Very well expressed. Had you come across FSP’s recent remark? “There are some bloggers who used to be anonymous but who now are not, and it has fascinated me that their non-anonymous blogging voice is different from their anonymous blogging voice — not just the topics, but the writing style and tone.” What think you?
Thanks Heather – I had seen Maxine share the link somewhere but hadn’t gotten around to reading it yet. I think whether anonymity or non- makes a difference in style or content depends on the blogger, but I suspect that it would make a difference for most. I can only say for myself that (admittedly not actually having tried it) an anonymous blog would not work, along the lines of “if I am going to put my stuff out there for everyone to read, I might as well sign with my name”. But maybe I’m just lucky that I can blog non-anonymously – and I have learned that, occasionally, one needs a thickish skin when talking to non-blogging types about one’s blog :)
Sharing secrets is great. It’s something most of us love to do. There’s a little hint of danger and sometimes a feeling of release. Also you can be fairly sure that you’re writing something no-one else knows about, so that makes it interesting.
I’ve shied away a bit from revealing stuff on NN, as I don’t want my blog to end up being mainly about me. I fear getting carried away and writing too much about the most interesting subject in the world – me!
And if you don’t like what I write on my blog – well, it’s just a blog: go somewhere else!
@ Steffi: To me, this statement captures the essence of blogging quite nicely. However, the reality is that there will always be those who feel compelled to exert control and to criticize. Partly because of this inescapable fact, I find that I self-censor my blogging (and to some extent my commenting) more and more frequently.
As a trivial example, I just returned from study section, in transit to and from which I had to pass through airport security 4 times. So I was going to write a post about the new TSA regulation to put shoes directly on the conveyor belt (rather than in a plastic tub), and ask whether this made any sense at all from a physics perspective. But I talked myself out of writing about it, for various projected reasons. Perhaps I’m just burned out on writing and expressing my opinions at the moment. ;-)
@Frank: I agree, it would be easy to get carried away. But you are the only person in the world that can write about things from your perspective – so let’s hear some more :)
@Kristi: yes, there are days or weeks when I don’t feel combative enough to write about anything even remotely controversial. The interesting thing about blogs, which I haven’t experienced myself yet, would be if someone posts a comment on an old post that you’ve changed your mind about for some reason – and then you still have to ‘defend’ your views somehow, or explain why you changed them, when you’ve actually just moved on. Has that happened to you?
Actually, I “talk big”, in fact I am very highly self-censoring and probably post only about a tenth of what I feel like posting. But I love the spirit of Steffi’s assertion. Maybe if I ever retire (as opposed to dying first), I’ll become more able to write what I want.
The FSP’s post struck me as funny becuase it was about people sending her one of her own blog posts or extracts to read – without realising she is the author of the blog. Love it!
One thing that I have found extrordinary since I started blogging, is how free some people feel to post pictures and write personal information about their children. That stuff is on the internet for ever. A. A. Milne/Christopher Milne situation writ large I’d suggest. I would hate it if now, anyone had a way to see what my mother or father wrote about me, or view my cute (not!) features, when I was in primary school!
Maxine, you’ve hit on one of the things I’m most careful about – my son. I’ve written about him, but thought quite a lot about how I’d do that (it’s no coincidence that you can only see him from the side/back on this post. And what I wrote are things that illustrate our situation, which I’ve decided I want to share – after all, this is ‘Science behind the scenes’, and that stuff has a huge role in our lives.
I do hope he’ll be ok with all this. And I apologize in advance if I ever just post a particularly cool picture he draws :)
I agree you have been very discreet about your son, Steffi. It isn’t so much the pictures they draw, to my mind, but personal details about them that I find go over the line. If people post personal details about the adults in their family, then one assumes they have obtained permission first. One’s children are not capable of that kind of objectivity where their parents are concerned. I had a very good, constructive set of interactions with a good blogging friend from the US about this a year or two ago – who wrote a lot about her children, their schoolwork, their health, etc – the personal privacy issues had simply not occurred to her, for her writing about her children on her blog was an extension of the parenthood role. (You see lots of journalists, usually women in “lifestyle” sections of newspapers, doing this kind of thing, too.)
@ Steffi: My mind has been changed on a number of topics, but since I rarely write about anything controversial (or have any comments on my posts), I haven’t had to explain or defend the original position. I’ve regretted some comments, though (under a pseudonym). Not because I’ve changed my mind, but rather because I think I could have worded things better, or because I’ve decided, after some thought, that the blogger isn’t worth engaging or reading (much less crafting a comment for).
BTW, I loved the photo of your son and his wonderful dragon drawing!
@ Maxine: It will be interesting to see how the children of bloggers respond to the eternal cyber-presence of their formative years. Judging from the attitudes and online presence of students who are in their 20s now, however, I doubt they’ll be bothered much. But yes, choice in the matter is probably a good thing.
Kristi – I agree that I have regretted things I’ve written on the internet – not because I don’t mean them but because I should have preferred to have phrased them differently or not at all. The medium is too encouraging of hastiness!
You may be right about children not minding about their lives being all over the internet when they grow up, but it is an interesting parallel development to the obsessions with legalities of the data protection act and other weighty legislation about personal privacy, I think ;-)
@ Maxine: Also interesting in parallel with discussions of the serious issues of sexual harassment, stalking, ogling, and suggestive language. Though I think the power structure is very different IRL, as compared to online, and perhaps that’s an important distinction.
Maxine and Kristi, having had my father tell ‘amusing anecdotes’ about me and my siblings in front of audiences growing up, I was pretty embarrassed on a few occasions… but I did get over it. If these anecdotes were still online, I might just laugh about them now. I don’t know, though. That was another personal detail ;)
It’s tempting to use anecdotes about one’s kids to illustrate and personalize stories, and I’m obviously doing it too (while trying to restrict this to those stories that are relevant). Our children are part of us – but they’re also their own person, and that’s where it gets tricky to decide what to say and what to skip!
The Facebook mixture of friends and family from different stages of my life is a very interesting phenomenon. I find that many of my status updates breed confused comments and questions from non-scientists / Brits / Canadians / kayakers / skiers / football fans / hockey fans.
I say: “screw it, it’s good for ’em”
Cath: spot on. I call it grassroots work ;)