A Little Perspective on the Internet and Blogging

Hi. My name's Jim.

In my heyday as a music critic, I've been yelled at and insulted by total strangers both in person and in print. I've had editors of major magazines with general newsstand circulation bring the hammer down on me in print. I've had record label executives call my house and leave messages telling me what a shithead I am, I've had many more emails from record label personnel telling me how awful I am. I've had angry phone calls and emails from professional musicians daring me to come to their next show so they could do all sorts of unpleasant things to me (the one singer threatening to piss on my head was the most amusing). My crowning achievement in this area was receiving an anonymous death threat. I came home one day and checked the messages on my answering machine and there it was: "You better watch what you write or you're going to get your throat cut."

All because of my writing about albums and bands.

Our little blogging community has had a 1-2 punch of flamewar scandals, and people seem to be demoralized and worn out over it.

At first I didn't understand why, and then I began to suspect that people don't really understand the position they put themselves in when they start a blog.

I think people might find the following primer useful:

1. You Are Not Among Friends
We share a hobby. We play old style D&D. I don't even think any of us even plays it the same way, but there's our common bond. Old D&D.

But I suspect people confuse their online D&D buddies with their real-life buddies. Even worse, maybe they associate their online olde tyme D&D compatriots with the people they played with in their personal golden age of gaming.

No.

We share a hobby. That's it. The people we're actually playing the game with are not the people we're blogging to. Different people. Different relationships. There is no other automatic commonality other than the game. We might be a different age, gender, nationality, religion, sexuality, have radically different values, and we'll never know if all we do is talk about the game.

The people in your real life, they're your friends. All us online people? We don't really know each other.

2. Nobody Cares About You Or Your Feelings
Let's say you are one of the luckiest and most blessed people on Planet Earth and have 1,000 people that love you and are loyal and friendly and deeply care about you. That leaves, in a best case scenario, 6,810,099,000 people in the world (according to US Census estimates) that really don't give a shit.

And let's continue to be charitable and say that only 0.01% of the world's population are assholes. Only one in ten thousand people is really not a great guy. That's still over 680,000 people in the world whose sole joy in life is pissing you off and making your life miserable.

Does anyone believe that only one in ten thousand people are assholes?

This is important to remember because:

3. You Are Making Yourself a Public Figure
A blog isn't your front porch. You don't have privacy. Yes, you can set up a closed blog with only readers that you invite, but that's not why you're starting a blog, is it?

You are making yourself a sub-Z level celebrity when you open up a blog. You ever talk shit about an actor? Politician? Political pundit? Newscaster? Some dumb shit on an incredibly degrading reality TV show?

By starting a blog, you are opening yourself up to such criticism. Inviting it, even, because you're saying "Here I am, here are my thoughts!" and you're broadcasting that to the world.

Even if they don't comment, any number of people are going to click on your blog and think, "What a fuckin' MORON. And so ugly, too!"

And all of this is only a problem because:

4. Blogs Are Very Personal Things
Most of the bloggers in our corner of the web are fairly prolific. They blog hundreds of times a year. The amount of time spent doing that is staggering. I think I'm more aware of how much time my blogging takes than most, because I always update the timestamp so it matches when I hit "Publish Post" and not leave it at where it was when I started typing.

When you spend that much time blogging, which really is an ancillary activity compared to the real hobby of actually gaming (or publishing), no matter how strictly you think you're staying on topic, you're going to reveal a lot about yourself. And most bloggers don't stay on topic that strictly. We talk about our jobs and family and health and everything.

We are exposing ourselves.

#3 and #4 are a bad combination for most people, especially when they forget #1 and #2.

I don't say this to discourage people from blogging. People just need to be prepared and have that armor-plated skin and not act legitimately hurt and surprised when there's controversy and drama on the goddamn internet.

Because it's going to get worse. Much worse. As this old school thing grows, we're going to get a lot more cool people and ideas and material, but we're also going to attract assholes like flies to shit. That's what happens when something gets popular. If you get 1,000,000 devoted fans, you also get 10,000,000 people devoted to tearing you down and telling you how much you suck.

Does this sound awful? Does this sound like something you don't want to deal with? Maybe you should keep your heads down and just play the game, because sticking your head up makes you one of the targets.

Me, I wore that death threat like a badge of honor.