Blogging: Confessing to the world 

Some time ago, a website highlighted the risks of public check-ins - online announcements of your where-abouts. The site's point was blunt: you may think you are just telling the world, 'Hey, I'm at this place' – but you are also advertising your out-and-about-ness to all kinds of people everywhere – not all of them people you might like to bump into. This appeared to confirm the growing awareness that there might be a downside to all the frantic sharing the web has enabled. The vast new opportunities to publish any and every aspect of our lives to a potentially global audience hold out all sorts of tantalising possibilities: Wealth! Fame! So we plunge into the maelstrom of the internet, tossing confessions, personal photos and stories into the digital vortex. Too late we realise that the water is crowded and treacherous - and we are lost.
Depressing? Perhaps, but don’t give up. This future has a map, drawn for us years ago by a reckless group of online pioneers. In the early days of the web, they sailed these waters and located all the treacherous shoals. They got fired from their jobs, found and lost friends and navigated celebrity’s temptations and perils – all long before the invention of social networking. These pioneers, the first wave of what we now call bloggers, have already been where the rest of us seem to be going. Before their tales scroll off our collective screen, it's worth spending a little time with them. After all, those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repost it.
In January 1994, Justin Hall, a 19-year-old student, began posting to the 'WWW', as it was then known, something inhabited mostly by grad students, scientists and a handful of precocious teens like him. The web had been invented at CERN, the international physics lab in Switzerland, so researchers could more easily share their work. Hall saw something else: an opportunity to share his life. Link by link, he built a hypertext edifice of autobiography, a dense thicket of verbal self-exposure leavened with photos and art. In January 1996, on a dare, he began posting a daily blog, and readers flocked to the spectacle of a reckless young man pushing the boundaries of this new medium in every direction at once.
Hall's ethos was absolute: cross his path and you could appear on his site; no topic was taboo. Certainly, this was the work of an exhibitionist, but there was also a rigour and beauty to his project that only a snob would refuse to call art. One day though, visitors to Hall's site discovered his home page gone, replaced with a single anguished video titled Dark Night. His story tumbled out; he’d fallen spectacularly in love, but when he started writing about it on his site he was told 'either the blog goes, or I do'. He'd published his life on the internet and, Hall protested, 'it makes people not trust me'. The blog went, but the dilemma persists. Sharing online is great. But if you expect your song of yourself to 'make people want to be with you', you'll be disappointed.
In 2002, Heather Armstrong, a young web worker in Los Angeles, had a blog called Dooce. Occasionally, she wrote about her job at a software company. One day an anonymous colleague sent the address of Armstrong’s blog to every vice president at her company – including some whom she’d mocked – and that was the end of her job. Those who study the peculiar social patterns of the networked world have a term to describe what was at work here. They call it the 'online distribution effect': that feeling so many of us have that we can get away with saying things online that we'd never dream of saying in person. But our digital lives are interwoven with our real lives. When we pretend otherwise, we risk making terrible, life-changing mistakes.
Armstrong’s saga had a happy ending. Though she was upset by the experience and stopped blogging for several months afterwards, she ended up getting married and restarting her blog with a focus on her new family. Today she is a star in the burgeoning ranks of 'mommy bloggers' and her writing supports her house hold. Once a poster child for the wages of web indiscretion, she has become a virtuoso of managed self-revelation. What Armstrong has figured out is something we would all do well to remember: the web may allow us to say anything, but that doesn’t mean we should.