Cara’s post about blog manners makes me glad that the eight or ten folks out there who actually read this blog are really nice. I’ve never gotten a mean comment here, in two years of blogging. (There’s not many of you out there, to paraphrase Spencer Tracy, but what there is is cherce!)
So here are a few somewhat random thoughts that have come into my head while reading Cara’s post and the resulting discussion —
I do disagree with the people who said that because blogging is a new medium, we are still working out the issues of politeness. Talking has been around for thousands of years. It’s the same thing. Blogging is a monologue at first, yes, but there is a significant area of it which is dialogue, or we wouldn’t do it, we would make scrapbooks for our knitting projects, or keep our writing in the journals under our pillows. We want the connection to others. (This is another reason that I always reply to comments made here. It’s not just because my grandma told me I should be polite, but because I appreciate that someone has made the effort, small as it might be, to comment, to make that connection. I also think that we should reply to the commenter. Would you make someone come to your house to get the thank-you note you wrote?) We should apply the same courtesies we give in conversation and everyday life to the conversations we have online.
Of course we want to be liked, of course we want just a little bit of attention, or we wouldn’t be blogging atal. (Aren’t we just a bit dismayed when we write a post and nobody comments?) That doesn’t mean we want to set ourselves up as a target for someone’s rudeness and/or bitterness.
We have lost so much of our sense of personal responsibility in the last fifty years or so that we don’t always remember that it isn’t "me, me, me" all the time. "Free speech," in the classic example, doesn’t give us license to shout "fire!" in a crowded theater, and it doesn’t give us the right to heap invective on someone who happens to have an opinion different from our own, or who is spending a lot of time being fascinated with a project that we may, perhaps, er, find relatively uninteresting.
I never thought I would knit socks. "Meh, socks. What’s the big deal about these Jaywalkers, anyway?" Now look at me! Wouldn’t I be feeling really stupid right now, if I’d told Cara last summer to stop already with the Jaywalkers!
It can be difficult for readers who don’t personally know the blogger to "get the whole picture." Unlike some bloggers, I choose not to give the whole picture — there is much of my life, even much of my blogging life, that does not appear here, and so I don’t always realize that the mental image that Bluestocking readers have of me is not the mental image I have of myself. I have to accept the fact that I may be misinterpreted because the alternatives are either a) be less reserved, or b) stop blogging, neither of which I want to do. Likewise, I must understand that I may misinterpret a commenter who chooses not to a) be reserved, or b) stop commenting. But then by a fairly logical extension, the commenter must consider that I, or any other blogger, may in fact be a real person with real feelings, and might as it happens be someone not unlike the commenter him- or herself. (A year or so ago, I passed along something I thought amusing, which another blogger found quite revolting, to my utter surprise, and said so in no uncertain terms. It colored my whole perception of that blogger, and I was so stung that I could not bring myself to even lurk for some time. But now that I do again, I am constantly amazed at how similar we are in so many other areas.)
Maybe I’m a bit sensitive on the subject of catty remarks because I’ve always been a bit awkward and bookish and I use words like "rivulet" which makes me a dork (isn’t it funny how your mental image of yourself still sticks around from junior high?!), and I’ve been on the receiving end of those kind of remarks, even as late as in my thirties. I can’t be surprised that there are rude people out there — I see it too often, from ostensibly trivial things like blog comments to drivers on the freeway to horrible events in the news, rudeness taken to its ultimate, devastating conclusion. Just because I’m not surprised doesn’t mean that I understand it, though. Why waste all of that time and mental energy on being mean?
(And yes, I have made a few of those catty remarks in my time. Sometimes I wish the earth would swallow me up, I’m so mortified. That’s what’s so great about the "publish" button — you don’t have to click on it. You have a second chance to think about what you’re saying before you say it.)
Stephanie’s remark that her blog is like her living room, and that she expects people to behave in her comments section the way they would (one hopes) in her living room, is worth remembering.
I apologize to the people who come here today and think "not another post about blog manners!" This is just my two cents. I was sorry that Cara felt compelled to write her post, because it meant that she is disturbed by the negativity she’s experienced, but on the other hand, I was glad that it was Cara who wrote it, as she obviously reached a lot of people — 185 comments at the time I write this! — and if more eyes have been opened, so much the better.
Jaywalkers in "Java" Cherry Tree Hill Supersock, finished yesterday. I worked these on larger needles than I’ve used before for Supersock, so the fabric is finer than usual — maybe just a tad thin, but wonderfully silky.
