The Blogging Self: A Work-in-Progress

One of the interesting "hidden" dynamics of blogging is the process of self-editing that lies behind every post.

When blogs/myspace/facebook first appeared, I remember the hue and cry about how "revelatory" and even "voyeuristic" they were (see this NYMag article from '99). How could people freely and openly share such personal information? And who would care to read about it?

After a few more years of use, we now know that many of us like to read about the minutiae of others' lives. We also know that there are pitfalls to being overly-exposed on the web: that photo of you in your wedding dress doing a keg stand, does not help you at Monday morning's interview at Goldman.

But blogging, for me, has never been about exposing myself. Rather, it has always been a careful process of hiding as much as I reveal. It's not an unselfconscious medium at all--every blog I write is carefully crafted to show a certain highly self-conscious personae. They're written to look casual, offhand, spur-of-the-moment. But I labor over them, going back to change pieces; editing; correcting; improving. Until it is--or is it until I am--just right.

I was made aware of this again during my last few posts about health care. I received several critical comments from colleagues and friends--the most painful ones were those that said that said that under my modest proposed changes to health care, care for themselves or for a loved one would have been difficult to secure. There's no way to know in any of these situations whether care would have been sufficient or not--but the point I want to underscore is not about health care at all. It is about how hard it was for me to receive criticism and to be exposed as either ignorant or, worse, uncaring. It was painful. And it made me not want to write any more posts that might expose any part of my own ill-or-unformed thinking that might counteract the image of myself that I have so carefully tried to construct through my blog: that of the loving, gracious, informed, intelligent pastor.

Here's the rub: what if I were interviewing for a job next year and instead of seeing a facebook photo of me doing keg stands (no such photo has been proven to exist) the search committee reads my health care posts? What if they say, "we can't call a pastor who believes that." Even if I later come out in support of a single-payer system... the blog lives on....

So, what does any blogger do? Use the blog as a place to honestly struggle with big questions, and inevitably reveal biases, prejudices, narrowness, and blindness? Or only post about things that will continue to conform to the image that we work so hard to craft--in my case, that of the young-but-wise competent professional pastor?

Every self-representation is an artifice. But liberal doses of humility--even humility like that in this post, which was tendered for its own sake but also to moderate the image of my self that might have been emerging in previous posts, and therefore, is conditioned by its own self-serving nature--still helps maintain the reader's trust that this blog is really me.

How important is it for me to maintain the impression that the construction of my self that appears in this blog is a nearly-finished, virtually-flawless product? Or should I be truly vulnerable... fully honest. Would I rather be universally appreciated... or an unrepentant work-in-progress?