I had a spectacular time at Patrick’s wedding last weekend. The weather in Maryland was beautiful (very hot!), and it was wonderful to see friends who moved away from Boston years ago, all in one place, all celebrating two people so dear to us.
I also had a chance to get to know some friends better, and to meet some great kids who I hadn’t crossed paths with yet in Boston. One of these people was an amazing girl named Tara. She is currently in the grant-writing, team-building phase of starting up a nonprofit organization dedicated to teens and the arts.
That sounds like the same old boring, but it isn’t. It’s utterly brilliant. She’s taking a three-pronged approach, and I’m not certain how much I can say about it, but one of these arenas involves blogging. And she doesn’t blog. So, her idea of instructing kids in how to blog boils down to “pedophiles bad.” And what she is building is so sound and fantastic, and these ideas about blogging are so reductive and represent such an unsatisfactory and troubling outsider’s viewpoint that I am giddy about building a true blogging curriculum for her. I am really excited about this, and about the good that I can do, down to the nuts and bolts of programming, development, and template design. I can teach basic hmtl to her young writers and image file management to her artists.
In a nutshell, and over the past seven years, I’ve learned that blogging safely is not really about “offline” safety. It’s about protecting your identity, yes, but also about building and branding your identity, seperation of self from persona (particularly when blogging as oneself), about building walls to insulate against hurtful comments, learning repose and civility and generosity. It’s about writing well and being incredibly well-informed. I would assemble a required reading list drawing from the link list to the right of this entry, but also incorporating news stories—not ones about myspace abductions, but timely coverage of blogging “events” such as the scandals surrounding Kathy Sierra, Doctor Flea, Eric Schaffer, Jessica Cutler, etc.—anonymous and eponymous, but all factious.
I have blogged as myself, and under several other personae; I know very well the pitfalls and advantages of each. I’ve received anonymous “You only wrote that because you’re fat and ugly and single” responses to blog entries, and bigoted violent messages that have made me cry. I’ve posted relatively innocuous comments in literary and theoretical discussions that have made people perceive me as a villain, and I have been targeted as a victim by groups of bloggers en masse during two or three heated debates. I’ve been lionized and lauded and championed and even rallied around, and I’ve been sidelined, sidetracked, and had my certainties shunted aside. I’ve been there. I can get these kids through anything.
