I struggled with defining the boundaries of this blog. The way I see it, there is a spectrum of how personal I can make the blog and I can identify at least three discrete stages on that spectrum:
- One extreme is an entirely impersonal blog — I state facts and perhaps some observations, and try to avoid making opinions or revealing any information about myself
- Relaxing this constraint, I can have a semi-personal blog — I state my opinions with the reasoning for them. The audience gets to learn things about me by following my posts. As time goes on, the audience knows more and more
- On the other extreme, I make this blog entirely personal — I talk about things that have happened in my life. In a way, this is going back to reporting facts and not as much my opinions
I think so far I’ve been oscillating somewhere between the second and the third. I don’t want it to be either extreme — I think the former is naive as to make the blog interesting, I have to state opinions, and whether I like it or not, information about me flows from the opinions I voice. You can and will get to know me through my posts. The latter is, in my view, self-indulging: it doesn’t serve a useful purpose for anyone other than me. The “sweet spot” is the middle, where I get to present my opinions, and have people critique them, without unnaturally coloring them with facts about my life, or artificially extracting all context from them.
In fact, I think I’ve managed to slip more than I would at first have thought. Just by reading these posts, and looking at the pictures I took, you can learn a lot about me. You know more or less where I live and maybe what I do; if you have good attention to detail you may even know what I look like (extra credit!). I think it’s fine but I do want to focus on my opinions. This is sometimes tricky — do I post about movies I’ve seen, saying which one I liked (and why)? Do I reveal information about my friends and people I talked to? These are tricky issues.
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