What do you do with your secrets? Do you go to the gym and run until you forget them? Do you scribble them on scraps of paper and then rip them to shreds? Do you stuff them into an imaginary box in the back of your mind and sink them deep into your subconscious?
Are you good at keeping them hidden?
Well if you are, you're sure missing out. Because your friends and classmates are busy blogging their tortured little hearts out.
Yes, the blog. The public diary where you can be "personal" and "private" -- you can stop being polite and start being real -- and still be the center of (someone's) attention. It's perfect for the passive-aggressive attention-whore/shy artiste/angst-ridden (semi) extrovert. And who among us isn't one of those, at least sometimes?
Millions of people are searching daily for the minor fame that blogs offer. Why wouldn't they be? Blogging couldn't be easier. On the personal internet journal site http://xanga.com, a blogger can buy a Xanga Premium account for between $2 and $4 a month, which allows the upload of up to 99 images and access to the tools needed to give a journal a sophisticated look. But even that commitment isn't necessary: anyone with a few minutes to spare can set up a free account and make the claim that his or her life is interesting enough to be in the public domain.
Bloggers often enforce that claim of relevancy by setting themselves up as representatives of a larger identity. They join groups of interlinked blogs called "blogrings" with names like "Feminists" or "Left Wing Rabble Rousers from Outer Space." They declare themselves a certain type of person, and, via blogring, connect themselves to others who see themselves in the same way.
Even blogs run by paid professionals, such as the "Tucker Max" blog (which recounts the exploits of an overgrown frat boy) or "Go Fug Yourself" (offering mocking tribute to celebrity fashion) maintain such blog-to-blog links. Tucker Max, for example, connects directly to 22 other professional blogs that have a similar tone, meant to appeal to similar readers.
In their search for similarity, it should be no surprise that school pride is a major source of blogger solidarity. On Xanga, there are 17 blogrings devoted to Johns Hopkins, altogether boasting 873 members. However, there are probably only a few hundred Hopkins affiliates and alumni blogging: members of one Hopkins blogring are likely members of another, so membership counts can be deceiving.
Regardless, with hundreds of us recounting our lives for the world, it's a surprise that the internet isn't more riddled with accounts of CVP partying, Charles Market meals and design group projects gone hideously wrong. Most of the journals simply don't give such specifics.
Instead the entries are largely repostings of news stories or YouTube clips, life summaries of a paragraph or two, or lines so utterly cryptic that they've descended into meaninglessness. After the apparently requisite picture/T.V. clip/news story link, the blood and guts of a blogger's life is told in an absolute minimum of detail. For example, a member of the 369-strong "Hopkins" blogring writes a short ode to her favorite Food Network show, ending the post with: "p.s. I officially had the worst night of all last night. #1, W-O-R-S-T, bad bad. *whew* p.p.s. Happy Easter!"
Seeing how the posts in these journals are calculated to be as impersonally personal as possible, the reason people write in blogs apparently isn't for the therapeutic renewal of the private, brutally honest "dear diary" variety.
Instead, they seem to blog in order to give a (semi)-public glimpse of private vulnerability: posting is an ostensibly "trivial" attempt at confession and absolution, with the public taking the part of the priest. On the 121-member "Johns Hopkins University Class of 2007" blogring, a member posts, seemingly apropos of nothing: "Life never feels nearly as bad when you have people that care about you. And when the chips are down, it's always nice to look up and see who is around. Thank you for being there for me."
Who the blogger is thanking isn't clear, nor why she's thanking them. Her member name is an obvious pseudonym, and she doesn't have a profile picture. But in that mask of technological anonymity, she's got the confidence to give a heartfelt thank-you, and others have the confidence to receive it.
Blogs aren't like MySpace profiles or Facebook pages: they aren't focused on the creation of groups of friends, and lascivious pictures aren't the normal means of personal presentation. The social connection is both there and not there, and that's where raw emotion can be written of without explanation. That's where cheesy videos and too-serious news stories can be posted. On a page no one paid for, under a false name and a generic picture, in a world where accountability is easily dodged and no face-to-face contact need be made, it's easy to be the sweet, emotional person you are when no one's looking, even as you give them a glimpse.
Blogging is a safely semi-anonymous search for acceptance. So isn't it strange that on a campus that prides itself on dorky introversion, only a fifth of us -- tops -- are blogging? Are we too good at hiding our secrets, or do we not have any secrets to hide?
