Burning Ones

Tonight I’d like to take a few quick minutes to think about how impersonal the web is and how much easier that makes it to share dark parts of yourself in an unvulnereble way. Not necessarily a good thing, so far as I’m concerned.

I found myself looking at some of things that Jess and I have written in the past on this blog and I realized that I would barely be willing to talk with most people (including very close friends) about some of this stuff. It’s got nothing to do really with my opinion of people. It’s that when you’re talking with someone face-to-face, you’re faced with an ugly reality that you’re exposed. There’s no way to turn off a person. When you get involved, you’re involved till the bitter (or sometimes very sweet) end.

This begs the question, is what the web is doing to my ability to interact with others a good or bad thing. On the one hand, issues that I have long kept secret are coming to the forefront, and one might say that this is a good thing. Indeed, anyone of my friends that read this blog now have the opportunity to bring issues up with me that I haven’t had the heart to bring up with them. On the other hand, I’m using an impersonal medium like a Blog to communicate deep issues of my heart to them. This too, is no good.

Now, in the beginning what the blog was supposed to be is an easy way to keep all the people that I want to keep updated updated. In the end, this is a good thing, because with the size of our social circles growing, it’s getting to be impossible to keep in touch with everyone personally. In that way, blogs foster communication between people who would otherwise not really be able to communicate on a regular basis. In fact, news on the blog might even encourage people to communicate with each other.

Despite this, there are millennia behind us where maintaining a huge, distributed circle of friends was simply impossible. The fact just came down to people not having the time to maintain personal relationships with more than a few people (relatively speaking). In that sense, a communication medium like a blog both helps and possibly hinders. I can communicate more things to more people more easily via a blog than I have ever been able to before. In theory, there is no limit to the amount of people who can subscribe to our blog and hear what’s going on in our lives. This is scary and cool all at the same time. However, am I truly communicating with people, or am I only making information available for consumption? I’m not sure.

I’m not at this point, advocating a reduction in the size of our circle. I’m merely trying to think about the wisdom in having 600 Facebook friends and a blog that is mainly about informing people about our lives which also happens to be our main way of communicating with everyone.

Anyway, I want to get off the computer now, as I’m trying to quit using the darn thing so much ;).

What do you think? Has the web degraded our ability to have authentic-human relationships? Thoughts in the comments!

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