I went to How To Get Naked, because I wanted to hear from Ronni and from Koan. It was a great session.
How to Get Naked, a panel on "identity blogging" lead by Blogher organizer Jory Des Jardins, Heather Armstrong (Dooce), Ronni Bennett (the link is to her thoughts on her presentation) & the afore-mentioned Koan Bremner (who was later in a not-funny conversation with Amber Nykola -more reported by Ronni.) (live blogged by Melissa Gira ) More on that session later.
Koan, bless her heart, has a taped transcript of the whole session.
Jory wrote, in announcing this blog,
The topics to be covered might be summarized:Are you interested in how other bloggers manage the adulation, the flaming, the realities of a two-way conversation? This is a topic that we'd like to refine and present at BlogHerCon.
- How do your friends and family react to your blog writings?
- Have you ever been "outed" for something confidential you wrote on your blog?
- What boundaries do you set in writing or for commentors?
- What about, well, over-sharing (the example was Ayelet Waldman's essay on her thoughts of suicide)
Little Judy has a good wrap-up of the discussion. Amy Gahren reflects on her comments. Jay Rosen, in the middle of a rumination on the amount of apprehension expressed by the BlogHer attendees in general, reported
Simple example from the “How to Get Naked” session: If you tell the people you’re afraid might read your blog what you really think, then you don’t care if they read it. This is extremely practical advice. If you don’t want it on the front page of the New York Times, don’t publish it in your weblog.
Koan Bremner: If you out yourself, no one can out you. (Practical, also powerful.) Heather Armstrong: “I have a spouse who is 6-3, and he is very protective of me.” (And so even though it’s possible some deranged troll will come after me, I am not really worried about it, and will keep writing in this personal way of mine.)
Kevin Drum said,
Unlike all the other sessions I looked in on, this one actually produced some consensus from the panelists: they pretty much agreed with the common sense notion that if you're going to blog about your private life on the web, you ought to give some thought to who might be reading it. Sure, it can be a liberating thing to do, but you can also cause yourself a considerable amount of pain when you let the entire world know exactly what you think of your mother, your boss, your friends, and your spouse. So before you write something, pretend these people are sitting in front of you and decide if you'd say it anyway. Wise words. (Or, as Koan Bremner put it, "think of the worst possible person who could read your post, and then assume they're probably going to read it.")
If you would like to see photos, visit Sweetney. Inflatable Sheep , prompted by the panel, reflected on taking down her personal pages...and wonders if that decision removed a vibrant part of her web presence.
Melanie McBride, who writes at Chandrasutra, saw a gender bias in the claim for transparency:
I don't agree with her assumption that women are somehow "less safe" than men online. I don't know about the issues of sexual abuse survivors-- I do know from reading the thoughts of women who have escaped obsessive, abusive, controlling relationships that there is a constant fear of being "caught" again.Transparency vs. safety: it's different for boys
Another issue you might want to explore with this topic is "transparency" and women blogging. A lot of male bloggers go on and on about how transparency = credibility. And to this end you see all kinds of male bloggers with their photos, IM, cel phone number, address, etc.
Any woman who has spent three seconds online knows that it's not exactly a safe place for women to be transparent in the same way as men. I have seen some women professionals put quite a lot up on their blogs (including myself). And that's great if they feel comfortable doing that. But this is not possible for some women - particularly sexual abuse survivors, etc (which brings us to the issue of anonymity and representation and the value of that for women and anyone for whom the act of blogging presents a genuine risk to their safety).
And so the transparency argument is loaded with a concealed bias - the bias of safety that most men enjoy online and off. Many women have to limit and (possibly) compromise the information they present on their blogs or websites which can, inadvertantly, compromise one's arguments for a credibility that is based solely on the volume of personal information that is available about you online. Look at Joi Ito's blog... he's practically left a key to his apartment under the front mat. Not too many women feel comfortable taking flickr photos of the contents of their bags, posting their phone numbers, pictures of their apartments, etc.
The Real Kato wrote (she has good pictures too):
Some seem to be worried that you might put your safety, and the safety of your loved ones, by exposing your lives to crazy Internet people. This is a fear that I strongly disagree with: that's one of those things where some anecdotal incident gets talked about over and over, and the fear becomes overblown. ("I have a friend who knows someone whose kids were kidnapped and eaten because a Crazy Person tracked them down over the Internet. Also, aspartame causes lupus.")
I did get impatient with how many fears people were expressing. But you know, transparency -- don't say anything you wouldn't mind shouted from the housetops --is a great shield. Jay Rosen thought the audience expressed more fears than a more male-dominated group would. He may be correct, but I don't think that women are inherently more fearful (or at risk, as Chandrasutra feels). There's a lot of random threat out there -- terror attacks, the bird flu, sexual predators -- that sort of coalesces around the issue of representing yourself on the web.I'd argue that the odds of a small-time blogger getting randomly blog-stalked is small (non-zero, sure, but small). The greater likelihood is that someone youalready know will try to use information in your blog against you, as we've seen happen before. But that goes back to the point about being cautious about what you say. (This topic comes up again in the mommyblogging session. And then I would almost have to eat my words when I get home... more about that later.)
The great thing here is our hunger for connection and real humanity -- that is the appeal of (for example) Dooce's blog. So what does that say? It is risky to be open, but it has rewards.
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Real Kato is a man! :-)
Posted by: Bake Town | Monday, August 08, 2005 at 11:51 AM
I find out about all of these things too late to attend them.
Posted by: Harrison | Monday, August 15, 2005 at 12:17 AM