I love blogging. I love reading blogs. Sometimes, I go a bit crazy if I forget to blog: words and feelings and scraps of dialogue build up inside my head, pickling away until I remember to unleash it all into my LiveJournal. Often, those are the entries my “friends” resonate with the most.

“Friends” rather than friends because really, people who read my LiveJournal, or my posts here, aren’t my friends (except, of course, for the ones who are). Interested, empathetic bystanders, yes. Friends? Probably not.

Which brings me to the big point: what should, and should not, be shared in a public blog? Should all facts be 100% accurate, or should we be blurring the truth a little for the sake of anonymity? When is an emotion too private to be shared?

See, I’ve grown up with the internet. I suppose it’s a Gen Y thing. Our first family computer arrived when I was still in primary school. We connected to the achingly slow internet shortly after I started high school. For several years, this (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v373/flordly/91317cac.jpg) XKCD image was an accurate representation of my life. Sometimes, when I’m sitting on a bus, I realise that my fingers have been moving, typing out my thoughts on a phantom keyboard.

Most of the time, I don’t think twice about writing out the details of, for a relevant example, my dog’s death.

The thing is, I like sharing. I like connecting with people in an environment where factors like appearance, socio-economic status, age and location are largely irrelevant, even if it’s only for a short while each day. I like pouring myself into words because this is what I do. I don’t just walk up that snow-capped mountain, I put into phrases and sentences exactly how the damp grass feels beneath my slippery sneakers. Blogging, to me, is the natural extension of this.

Yet, at the same time as being a person who likes sharing, I’m also intensely private. Now and then I’ll be sitting reading, or standing at the sink washing dishes, and all of a sudden I’ll realise in a cold shock that I’ve just written down one of the absolute truths of who I am in a place more public than a billboard on the Princes Highway.

Why do we do this? What is it that drives us to share snippets of our everyday lives with people we’ve never met? I have no answers, but I’m interested to hear yours.

A couple of days ago I read an article by Emily Gould on the ramifications of broadcasting the details of one’s everyday life across the internet (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/magazine/25internet-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin), and it was this article that triggered the thought processes which lead to this post. It’s interesting reading, and some parts of it are chillingly close to home.