I take great joy in being able to write blogs containing my thoughts and views and personal release. I see a blog as a sort of journal, but much more expedient because writing things out causes pain and inherits a legibility speed limit.
I'm able to communicate with distant friends and expand on my feelings about different successes and failures. I can, in effect, communicate my life to others while at the same time complete a research project, chat with a peer, finish the FAFSA, buy a new pair of shoes, and expand my vocabulary near simultaneously and, I must say, quite efficiently.
But this freedom and massive capability has its own pitfalls. And to give a fairly decent analogy, I must give some background:
I am a performer by nature. Almost my entire life I have been singing and acting on the stage of life–recently I've also been acting on an actual stage. As a performer, I had to learn that image plays an enormous part of life. You must make yourself appealing to your audience, no matter who that might be. Otherwise, you may very well end up with no audience at all, and where's the fun in that?
And the more popular you become as a performer, the better you must become as a performer. The wider your audience, the more you must act for them. In the end, you cannot win them all and the only thing you can do is try to make as few as possible hate you.
When it comes to the internet, similar measures must be taken. I write this blog, and because the entire world–including potential future employers and colleges–can peruse at their own caprice, passing judgment on everything I say. My own mother has probably learned a few things about me she did not know (and probably did not want to know). And because I'm forced to perform, I am obliged to censor what I say. I was virtually forced–ah, mother…–to delete or alter one of my 15 things. I understand why: it is nothing but an image. My mother's main lecture point was, "it only takes one person to read your post and then …." So I complied and removed the sentence that in 25 years or so could destroy my life.
What I say in a blog–provided it involves no illegal or immoral activity–really should not have any bearing on what an employer thinks of me. Damn the internet for providing such an amazing chimeric escape for personal thought and reflection on life and giving others the ability to judge your ever word.
