Over-sharers

This year is quickly disappearing, and with it, so will this web address.

I remember somewhat sheepishly the day last May when I read of our contractual blogging obligation. I remember the true feelings of panic and disgust. I had been staunchly avoiding internet networking sites (I have since joined Facebook) and was actively hiding from cyberspace, and subsequently, all the people I had left behind in my life.

And yet, I could have anticipated how much I would grow to enjoy it. My very first post on this blog, while rife with anxiety, seems to give a little wink to the future me, the now-comfortable-blogging-me, the person who has shared almost every feeling of the year– gripe and triumph– with all the good citizens of the interwebs.

This is because the same thing that makes me hesitant to indulge a public forum is also what allows me to enjoy it. I am a classic over-sharer. If there is ever an opportunity to share too much of my personal self, I will do it, with anyone, for any reason.

The AIRs were talking the other night about whether or not each of us would like to keep a blog past this year. I was the only one who was seriously considering it. It’s not that they did not enjoy blogging– there were high points in the public documentation of this experience for each of them– it’s just that it seems so self-indulgent and self-involved.

This feeling was validated by an experience we had earlier that night. We had just finished checking out the website of some filmmakers who are coming to Hub-Bub in May. They have made a film about their relationship– one in which they met on the internet and preceded to communicate only through creative and digital mediums (no talking), even after they met face to face. They then made a movie about this experience, in which the plot takes you through the moment they decide to make the movie and the initial stages of the movie, so the movie becomes about making the movie. They then made podcasts about the experience of making and promoting the movie. There were several enormous projects all balled up in this tiny little corner of experience– a string of mediations of epic proportions, when really the original experience was perhaps the most valuable part of the experiment (and if it was not, then all the more reason to have left it there). The whole thing just seemed an example of how what starts as public documentation of a person’s life can become a way of disconnecting from it. We may begin by talking to an audience, but we often end up talking to ourselves, and worse– believing that the audience is there, and they are just like us. Connection becomes alienation.

Now, of course I am not arguing against mediation. It’s the reason I am not content to just live life– it is the reason I make art in the first place, because the initial experience is not enough and I crave the documentation. And yet, there is something so perverse about sharing through the blog– something about the relationship between the writer (me) and the audience (you) that is so heavily mediated in and of itself. After all, I am, right now, talking to a little text box on my computer screen. I have no evidence of having made a tangible connection with you, the outside world, but by “publishing” I am falsely assured that I have. All I have really done is climb deeper into my own head, narrow my world to myself and the computer screen, and inflate it to the utmost importance.

This is so risky. One risks becoming affected– living as if in front of an audience (when perhaps there is none), while moving farther from oneself in the process (you could argue that with the creation of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube we are all now examples of this. I have written in a previous post that we may not even be aware of the long-term affects of these circumstances). One risks becoming a static, closed system– containing the world within oneself, creating definitives of inherently amorphous experiences in order to better relate them to the aforementioned “audience” (in this post alone, I have linked to two previous posts; I linked to three in my last substantial post). One risks confusing the documentation of living art, or the documentation of actual art, with art. I have neglected my journal this year– maybe ten pages in nine months. It was replaced by a far less intimate (and arguably less valuable) document in the form of this blog.

This evening my brother sent me this:

“It’s the death of privacy,” he told me, after I had watched it. Now, of course, this video is not directly related to everything I was talking about above, but it is another “point” for turning off; over-sharing is ok if that’s who you are (and I am), but you should try to relegate it to face-to-face interaction. It can do less damage that way. Watching this pathetic woman makes me want to reclaim my privacy in a big way…and it also kind of makes me want to post it on my blog and talk about it. I just can’t decide which I want to do more in the long run.To blog or not to blog? What do you guys think?