All the reciprocity of an online
life, making new friends and keeping in contact with old ones, stemming from
online communities is an important intellectual and emotional factor in many
people’s everyday lives. The opportunity
to comment on one’s own life and get responses from online companions through
blogging is also an important part of many people’s daily lives. However, apart from the emotional support
blogs give to people in their online lives, do blogs also have an impact on ‘Real
Life’ (otherwise known as RL), i.e., the place bloggers go to eat?
Of course, some blogs have a very
positive effect upon RL, not only affecting their authors, but also making a
real difference. Two recent very
successful charity projects sprang from the minds of popular knitting bloggers:
Ryan of Mossy Cottage Knits
(http://www.nwkniterati.com/MovableType/MossyCottage/) and Stephanie
Pearl-McPhee of Yarn Harlot
(http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/).
Tricoteuses
Sans Frontières
(Knitters Without Borders)
TSF is a fundraising movement
started by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee in response to the devastating December 26, 2004 Asian
tsunami. In her January 3, 2005 post,
‘Needs and Wants’ <http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2005/01/03/needs_and_wants.html>,
Stephanie wrote about how she felt obscenely wealthy compared to the tsunami
victims, and she issued a challenge to all of her readers: to distinguish for
one week between a need they had (food, water, shelter) and a want (lattes and
yarn) and to then send some or all of the money they saved that week not
spending on wants to Medecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. She then volunteered to keep a running tally
of how much people donated in the sidebar of her blog, updated constantly. Stephanie chose Medecins Sans Frontières because
they are nonreligious and remain impartial to external pressures, going in to
places only to help the people of that area without political concerns. Of course, the fact that her brother-in-law
is the Director of Human Resources for MSF Canada also tends to make her views a
bit biased, but nepotism is not always a bad thing, and in this case
personalized a charity at a time when many people were comparing charities and
trying to decide where to donate money and time to help the victims of the
tsunami. Watching Stephanie tally up the
donations was also gratifying to those who could not afford to make a
substantial donation on their own—it let them know that their community as a
whole could make a big difference.
By 6:45 PM on January
4, 2005, Stephanie reported that TSF members had donated $10,870
(Canadian). (Pearl-McPhee, 4.1.2005) Many knitters also donated prizes to be
distributed randomly throughout the contributors as both a thank-you and an
incentive to donate. In her July 6, 2005 post,
‘Inspired, or profoundly stupid?’ <http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2005/07/06/inspired_or_profoundly_stupid.html>,
Stephanie proudly announced, that at $78,747 TSF ‘has now officially raised
more money than Willie Nelson. [I am]
contemplating dancing in the street. You
guys are changing the world. Next
stop…$100 000.00’
Blogger Ryan of Mossy Cottage Knits also started a
small, nepotistic, project asking her readers for charitable donations. Her ‘Cuzzin Tom’ is a Buddhist monk who
decided to move to Mongolia
to pursue his religious life. While
doing research about the country, he discovered that recent economical factors
in Mongolia
meant that about a third of the population was living in poverty. Many children in the capital city, Ulan
Bataar, took to living in the heating ducts under the city to get through its
very cold winters. He decided that he
wanted to ‘find a way to create some dynamic, positive energy’ with his move to
Mongolia. (Cuzzin Tom, 27.6.2005 <http://danzanravjaa.typepad.com/my_weblog/2005/06/dulaan_to_other.html>) Cuzzin Tom teamed up with Ryan and F.I.R.E.
(Flagstaff International Relief Effort) to start a movement to send warm,
high-quality hand knits to the children of Mongolia. (F.I.R.E. regularly sends shipments of warm clothing
and medical supplies to the people of Mongolia.) He did not have a regular blog at that time,
though he was a part of the Mossy Cottage community as a regular commenter. Cuzzin Tom started a blog soon after he
moved: Dreaming of Danzan Ravjaa (<http://danzanravjaa.typepad.com/my_weblog/>).
Ryan announced the Dulaan project
on her blog on January 31,
2005. By 7 February 2005, there were over 50
people on the ‘brigade,’ as Ryan called them.
(Morrissey, 7.2.2005 <http://www.nwkniterati.com/movabletype/archives/MossyCottage/001181.html>) The original goal of the Dulaan Project was
to make and donate to F.I.R.E. 500 knitted items and polarfleece blankets
before July 1, 2005. Dave Edwards, one of the community-founders
of F.I.R.E. doubted that they would not receive even that amount, and Ryan made
sure that her readers knew it, making 500 items a challenge for her Dulaan
Brigade. (11.2.2005 <http://www.nwkniterati.com/movabletype/archives/MossyCottage/001184.html>) Various knitters in the online community made
designs specifically for this project. There
were several knitting parties to complete items, and by March 16, 2005, Ryan was able to post
a picture of Dave Edwards in defeat <http://www.nwkniterati.com/movabletype/archives/MossyCottage/001227.html>,
when the item count was at 250, with a reported 90 more on the way. By the July 1, 2005 deadline, F.I.R.E. officially received 4,517
warm items to take to Mongolia,
from all over the United States
and from as far afield as Croatia,
Germany
and Tasmania. (http://www.nwkniterati.com/movabletype/archives/MossyCottage/2005_07.html)
In light of the success of the
Dulaan project, Ryan has recently declared the counting for Dulaan 2006 to be
open. Their goal is 4,518 (one more than
items donated for the 2005 drive) garments to be donated by July 2006. The response was very enthusiastic, with
commenter Susanna Hansson stating:
What brought me to this project
was: YOU. What made me stay interested
and finally knit some Mon-frickin-goleean hats was: YOU.
It's not that I'm a callous person
who doesn't care about the plight of Mongolian children; it's that this project
is offering me a sense of community that is often absent in other charitable
efforts (the one exception that comes to my mind is Stephanie's Tricoteuses
Sans Frontières project).
(Comment to Morrissey, 22.8.2005
<http://www.nwkniterati.com/movabletype/archives/MossyCottage/001482.html>)
The TSF movement and Dulaan Project
serve to illustrate just how powerful internet communities can be. These charitable projects both raised much
more interest and many more donations then their inceptors ever dreamed they
would. Ryan and Stephanie were both able
to personalize a charity project in a way that made its purpose resonate with
their readers. As can happen with any
blog, once you read it and get to know that blog-person, you come to trust
them, to feel you know them. TSF and the
Dulaan project were the result of trust and empathy. Stephanie’s readers trusted her, and donated
to MSF. For all anyone—including
Stephanie—knows, not one of her readers donated. They could have made up the numbers they told
her they were donating, and she could have made up the total. She trusted her readers to report truthfully
to her, and they trusted her to tell them the true total.
Ryan’s project was a little
different, in that while she did not see the majority of the donated items in
person and had to trust her readers, just like Stephanie, she received the item
totals directly from F.I.R.E., who were cataloguing the items as they arrived. These two charity projects, though both very
successful, were not terribly personal. They
are great examples of the networking power of high-profile bloggers and the
generosity of knitters. However, what
happens when a blog affects an individual’s life for the worse?
Individually, blogs can have
beneficial and detrimental effects on people’s lives. The whole idea that you can rant and rave,
complain about your days to an unseen audience is very tempting. However, the internet is not a void populated
by ghost commenters. In some ways, the
internet can be likened more to a Panopticon, a prison designed so that every
prisoner can be seen at every moment.
Prisoners must then always act appropriately because a guard might be
watching them. Writing on the internet
is like being in a large crowd scene onstage: though it may appear that your
part is inconsequential, someone, somewhere in the audience will watch you and
notice what you are doing. (Rheingold,
2000:xxx)
Such was the case for a now
well-know blogger, Heather Armstrong. She
started her blog at www.dooce.com in June of 2001 (then as Heather Hemingway),
while working for a company in Los
Angeles. Though
Heather wrote about her job online, she never stated the name of the company
she worked for, the names of her coworkers, and was unspecific about may other
vital details as well. However, she did
not stint about other things on her blog, publishing some opinions about the
company, her coworkers or her boss, in an exaggerated, humorous way, painting
caricatures of them. In this manner, she
felt free to describe how much her Prada-buying boss intimidated her, and gave
several tutorials on how to avoid doing work properly while at work, along with
discussions on the best way to take a nap in your car in the middle of the
day. Her very first blog post is even
called, ‘Reasons I should not be Allowed to Work From Home’ (27.6.2001 <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/06_27_2001.html>).
These posts are amusing and meant
to be taken lightly, but there is an undercurrent of discontent in many. Heather obviously disliked aspects of her job
and many of her co-workers, and some posts give hints of the fact that this may
have made her a bit difficult to work with.
In February of 2002, one of her co-workers anonymously emailed many
people in Heather’s company, notifying them of Heather’s website and the
writing she was doing, ostensibly about them.
She explains very rationally in a post titled ‘Tell it to Their Face for
Christ’s Sake’ (27.2.2002 <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_27_2002.html>)
that she discussed her writing with her boss and a human resources representative,
telling them that she ‘had no ill will toward anyone at my company… [And] most of what I had written was grossly
exaggerated for comedic effect’ and that an ‘Asian Database administrator’ that
she made fun of a few times on her blog ‘was a willing participant. He thought it was funny. That was all that mattered to me.’ Her boss ‘assured me that there were no hard
feelings’, but Heather was fired two weeks later:
My boss and the human resources
representative pulled me into a conference room and handed me my last paycheck. They explained that the company had a
zero-tolerance policy about negativity (?), that my website was influencing the
younger, more impressionable members of the company, and that the CEO demanded that I be terminated at once.
Heather’s termination raised some
interesting questions, several of which she asked, herself, in her 26 February,
2002 post, the day she was fired, ‘Collecting Unemployment’ <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_26_2002.html>:
At what point does my personal
website, regardless of what I’ve published on the site, affect my professional
life? If I am not responsible for the
two colliding (meaning, an anonymous person tips off my employer that I run a
personal weblog), is it right that my employer should condemn me for expressing
personal dissatisfaction?
As Biz Stone terms it, ‘Heather’s
perception of her blog is fundamentally flawed.’ (Stone, 2004:90) Yes, she kept her discretion in part, as she
did not use anyone else’s name, or tell the name if her company. However, she did use her own name, and anyone
who knew her and searched for her online could find her blog, and learn
negative things about her company. It
was an embarrassment to the CEO of that company to discover one of his
employees was publicly posting how she deliberately arrived late at work, left
early, and took naps in her car in the middle of the day—even as a joke. Though Heather says she was exaggerating, this
writing could have given her supervisors reason to scrutinize her work more
closely.
It is interesting to note how the
person who alerted everyone else about Heather’s website chose to remain
anonymous. It was a way for that person
to stir things up at work without any personal risk, and it ended up greatly
affecting someone else’s life. I do
wonder if Heather’s superiors tried to find out who tipped them off; Heather
does not mention if she ever knew who it was.
The option of anonymity on the internet protected this person, but since
Heather chose to give up the privilege of anonymity, she was the one who paid
for her actions.
Heather’s co-workers and her bosses
were not the only ones to be upset by her blog.
Her family also came across it unexpectedly, and learned some of her
opinions of them and how she poked fun at them for their spiritual
beliefs. Heather came from a deeply
religious Mormon background, and even attended Bringham Young
University. Soon afterwards, she left the Mormon Church,
and the disillusionment she had with her former lifestyle contributed to her
defiant outlook: ‘I refuse to live in fear.
I refuse to be censored. I’ve
lived my life far too long in fear of disrupting expectations.’ (Hemingway, 27.2.2002 <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_27_2002.html>)
Nevertheless, Heather later
reflected on how her posts had hurt her family.
She states in the same post, ‘This is Going to Be A Long One, So Don’t
Say I Didn’t Warn You’
<http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/05_19_2003.html>, that she both
wished that she could ‘take back EVERYTHING I had written that had hurt them,’
and that ‘despite the pain I have put my family through, I do feel good about
what I do here. I’ve used [it] to try
and become a better writer.’ Heather is
stuck in between wanting to say whatever she wants to write, and the pain of
the responsibility she then incurs for writing things in public that she
believes to be true—but that deeply wounded both her professional career and
her loved ones. She views the fact that ‘I
am...now THAT GIRL who lost her job because of her
website’ as a responsibility, and tells her tale as a instructive example that ‘There
is no such thing as unadulterated freedom of speech with a blog, not if you’re
brave enough to tack on your real name to what you write.’ (From Armstrong, 19.5.2003 <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/05_19_2003.html>)
The notoriety of Heather’s tale has
moved the word ‘dooced’ into modern parlance.
A www.google.com search of the word on August 7, 2005 found nearly 27,000 results,
from all over the world. It truly
boggles the mind to think that all of these entries can be traced back to a
25-year-old in Los Angeles who liked bean burritos and had to ‘resist [the]
urge to tell nieces and nephews that the reason they go to church is so that
mommy and daddy can prepare to eat them one day in the Mormon Temple.’ (Hemingway, 30.8.2001 <http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/08_30_2001.html>) Heather still writes her very popular blog,
now as a stay-at-home mother, and has been interviewed many times about her
blogging experiences. These days, her
entries consist more of how to deal with a constantly screaming toddler than
about the wonders of bean burritos, but her voice remains strong and sure.
A much more positive way that blogs
are affecting individuals’ lives is the fact that a blogger who develops their
writing skills through blogging may end up the author of several hard-copy
books, as happened to Stephanie Pearl-McPhee.
Going from a blog to a book may be a smooth transition, simply lifting
entries from the blog, or may use the refined writing skills of the experienced
blogger to write something completely new.
Blogs do not readily lend themselves to book form, being more suited to
hypertext: they are written in short, non-linear sections, and generally have
no plot. Blog posts are extensions of
the main goal of webboard posts—wit rules in blogland just as it does in online
communities. If your blog persona is
witty, it does not matter what your qualifications are or who you are in RL: ‘This
version of me has gotten two book deals and a dream job at one of the world’s
most innovative companies. In the real
world, I am a state college dropout. How
did I do this?’ (Stone, 2004:191) Unlike books, which are often cherished and
regarded as vessels full of human history, blogs are meant really to capture
moments, to be experienced by the reader, who will then move on; ‘digital
textuality stands to be erased from its very beginnings.’ (Raley, 2001)
However, though writing a book is
better paying than writing a blog (which one does free, unless the blog draws
enough traffic to make it worthwhile to place ads on it), it cannot be more
satisfying than the instant feedback and communication through a community that
a blog offers. A book, though a
wonderful piece of technology is simply a thing, disconnected from the online
network of bloggers and commenters. Book
authors often remark upon one another’s thoughts and opinions, much as bloggers
do, but at a much slower pace. In the
time it takes for one book to be written and published in reaction to another book,
many thousands of blog entries and comments will have come and gone about many
different subjects.
A book has the advantage over a
blog in that you need only access to the book itself and the knowledge to read
it in order to benefit from the information it presents. Once a book is made, it is an entity unto
itself; when you know how to decode it, you can use it anywhere. Blogs, on the other hand, require access to
the internet, and complex pieces of machinery to get to the information they
offer. Once a blog is made, it does not
simply exist—it evolves as it links and is linked to, as people read it and
comment on it both on the blog and on their own site. A well-read blog becomes a far-reaching
entity, firmly woven into the web of readers and writers of blogs.
No comments:
Post a Comment