Dean Christakos

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November 5, 2004

Why this weblog exists

Via Metrokitty, I found this entry at Websnark commenting on why the author's blog doesn't discuss his personal life. He makes an insightful observation:

It's easy to think "this is mine. This is intimate. This is my diary." But it isn't. It's public. Even if you lock your entries to Friends, unless you know all of your friends well, you're still speaking to an audience.

I've received comments about why my weblog doesn't discuss more of my personal feelings and events in my life, since lots of non-topic-specific weblogs tend to discuss an author's personal musings, reflections, and emotional discussions on the author's personal life. Then, earlier today, someone made some searches through my weblog using search terms directly related to my personal life. As I said in my About section, I'm actually pretty open about that sort of thing, if you bother to ask me personally. I don't feel the need to use this as a sounding board to discuss these things in public. First of all, it's just not fair to other people who might appear in the entries to have descriptions of my encounters with them appear in public. They didn't ask for that. Next, while I, personally, might like to keep an account of the goings-on in my own life, that would be something for private purposes. I do keep a sort of diary, but it's a pen-and-paper diary on my Moleskine notebook, mostly so I can keep track of what I did on a particular day and write down thoughts and ideas that aren't yet ready for public consumption. It doesn't do anyone any good to have my entire life up on the web and recorded by The Way-Back Machine for posterity. Finally, this domain name is "Christakos.com", not "DeanThePundit.com" or "DeansAttemptAtFindingCatharsis.com". In a sense, I'm the caretaker of a domain name that represents my entire extended family. It just so happens that, for now, I'm making personal use of the domain, but I'd rather not have the rest of my family implicated in my personal opinions and goings-on in my life, which are my own and do not represent my family as a whole. Anyone doing a Google search for "Christakos" or "Dean Christakos" will pull up this page. It's not even remotely private, so whenever I write something, I have to wonder whether it's something that I want the entire world to know about, including family, friends, acquaintances, potential employers, etc.

As I consequence, I prefer to keep this weblog limited to discussing interesting things I've found on the web, making comments about encounters with art and pop-culture, technology issues that concern me, and musings about my travels. Sometimes I briefly mention politics, but that's the exception, not the rule. If I go to a party, I'll mention that I went to a party, but I won't mention whose party, what their address is, or who did what to whom while I was there. It's ok to blog your own life, but no one asked to have their life blogged by someone else.

On another note, I'm sorry that I haven't updated this, more. I have been quite busy all through the month of October, and haven't been able to make more frequent updates. I'll try to change that, and both of my regular readers will have something new to read on a semi-regular basis.

Posted by Dean at November 5, 2004 10:10 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Tiffany Uk at August 13, 2011 3:49 AM

Posted by: cheneeee at October 10, 2011 3:26 AM