I’m having trouble writing this morning. I barred myself from checking blogs and emails over the weekend because by the end of last week I had started to feel odd about this online world. Sometimes I struggle to get my head round it. I remember when I started to use Facebook worried I was missing out on something. I began wary of the alien space, and then got really into it, then realised I was checking it obsessively and felt it was warping my sense of reality. Subsequently, I left (although was pretty annoyed that I couldn’t delete my profile but could only disable it). Friday I started to consider how I feel about this online blog space. I read Alex Pearl’s description of what he got out of it and even though it was all very positive I felt deflated reading it. Also last week in a discussion with an artist friend she mentioned agenda and that when reading anything you should consider the writers agenda. Then this morning I read David Minton’s latest post and couldn’t bring myself to write the regular weekly update that I normally do. If as a writer I always have an agenda how can it be untangled in faceless exchanges that solely exist as words? In some ways for me it makes me feel more isolated, more anxious, and more vulnerable than in physical reality. David talks about trusting each other but I don’t understand how you can trust such an obscure world. It seems impossible not to be anxious about being misinterpreted, especially as your whole online identity is based on what you say. It’s quite intense to me but it has made me do a lot of thinking and questioning. That's why I still do it.
I too feel there is an element of courage that I have to find to click ‘publish’ at the end of a post. Gulp.
