Sharing is caring

As I sit here and strike finger to key, right here, right now, I have no idea what this entry is going to be about. The title area is still blank.

Not that my head and heart are empty, in fact, its the very opposite. Way too much going on and not knowing where to start and what to stay. I suppose you can say that this is finding the start of the string that I think, over time, will unravel to be a very long, knotty one.

I've been sitting thinking about this blogging thing and wondering, "Why do people blog exactly?" Do they do it for others or do they do it for themselves? Do they do it to let off steam, unravel the ball of string or is it just for the sake of record? That one day their children and grandchildren may look back and read their grandmother's blog. The blog of Ann Frank....

Blogging is quite different from a diary though, as its available to all and sundry to read. Its not for your eyes only, it is not personal. So that in itself puts a blogger at a cross road. If you choose to follow the route of a public diary, are you brave enough to share and bare all, knowing everyone and their grandmother is reading it? If you censor your thoughts and feelings, is this then really a "diary platform" for your daily rants and raves?

For those that blog and have chosen to make it their *public private diary platform, perhaps it is that, that has made blogging so popular. The opportunity to share private thoughts and feelings relatively anonymously without eye to eye contact. On the flip side, it gives us the opportunity to look inside someone's head and heart without too much face to face probing. And you wonder where the word facebook came from...

Now is this a bad thing or a good thing? Life is so full and complicated as it is. We are so bombarded by constant information in the age of information technology, is blogging just adding to the constant drone of information noise in our heads? Does it add opportunity for the unsavoury variety in our societies to hone in on someone and incur some form of harm, security breach, stalk them, threaten them, rebuke them, lure them, scam them, abduct them? Is it safe? Ok, so I have a very active imagination but, the level of personal information and images people share across digital platforms is quiet astounding to me and I often wonder how the deviant mind out there would find a way to use these bits, or wads in some cases, of information for more illegal and twisted purposes. But, we cannot live in fear.

The thing is, when we get our thoughts down on black and white, it helps us sift through the clutter in our minds. It helps us to be more honest about and with ourselves. It helps to gain clarity. It helps to gain understanding of ourselves and of others. It helps to see things from another person's perspective. It helps to share, and in my world, sharing is caring.

*new oxymoron ;-). I love oxymorons, especially "government worker"