Blog Watch Update 1
I started keeping track of a few blogs online over the past few weeks. A few of them have not posted since before Valentine's Day - one woman gushed on her blog that her husband was so romantic because he made a roast and they ate Twizzlers while watching a chick flick, not my idea of romantic, but hey, whatever gets you going. Another blog updated the status of their building project, and I'm pleased to report that the house is coming along quite well. They have gone from laying the foundation a few weeks ago to putting down the trusses for the first floor this week. I'm interested to see what happens next week.
Needless to say, this experiment in snooping isn't nearly as interesting as I had expected, largely because it is hard to discuss baby pictures to great lengths. I picked rather mundane blogs on purpose, so that's part of my frustration. I think part of my fascination with this comes from my struggle with privacy in the digital age. For example, yesterday I had a store ask me for my phone number in case they had a problem with their credit card machine. I balked and gave them my office number, completely turned off by the idea of this nice woman in the knitting store having my phone number. I also recently joined Facebook, which I have always resisted because of privacy issues. I am finding that the number of setting available on Facebook are a little bit confusing, though I feel pretty confident that you can use the site to keep in touch with friends and still keep some level of privacy. I have no idea where this fear of invasion of privacy came from, I don't think it stems from an unhealthy fear of identity theft (part of me would be flattered if someone used my identity for something else). I have had a few instances of people having my information and abusing it by calling me and leaving scary messages (changed my number once because of this). Maybe it is more of a general feeling of "none of your f**king business" that runs deep in my personality. Which brings me back to putting pictures of your children on the Internet where any stranger can look at them. When there are great social utilities like Facebook and MySpace which allow you to only let people you know look at your site...maybe they don't know. Maybe they aren't that concerned. I'm fascinated by this.
Needless to say, this experiment in snooping isn't nearly as interesting as I had expected, largely because it is hard to discuss baby pictures to great lengths. I picked rather mundane blogs on purpose, so that's part of my frustration. I think part of my fascination with this comes from my struggle with privacy in the digital age. For example, yesterday I had a store ask me for my phone number in case they had a problem with their credit card machine. I balked and gave them my office number, completely turned off by the idea of this nice woman in the knitting store having my phone number. I also recently joined Facebook, which I have always resisted because of privacy issues. I am finding that the number of setting available on Facebook are a little bit confusing, though I feel pretty confident that you can use the site to keep in touch with friends and still keep some level of privacy. I have no idea where this fear of invasion of privacy came from, I don't think it stems from an unhealthy fear of identity theft (part of me would be flattered if someone used my identity for something else). I have had a few instances of people having my information and abusing it by calling me and leaving scary messages (changed my number once because of this). Maybe it is more of a general feeling of "none of your f**king business" that runs deep in my personality. Which brings me back to putting pictures of your children on the Internet where any stranger can look at them. When there are great social utilities like Facebook and MySpace which allow you to only let people you know look at your site...maybe they don't know. Maybe they aren't that concerned. I'm fascinated by this.
posted by Courtney at 4:36 PM
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