Sunday, October 19, 2003

I have been wondering if blogging is more of a misery than a pleasure. I mean this is a place where you put your personal thoughts, rants and raves but yet this is where people who do not know you very well judge you on a whole as well. You lose and gain friends while blogging. It is all a matter of whether they support what you write or not. This is a personal online diary that promises democracy and freedom of speech yet hide the consequences that follow.
Anyone in the world can view your site. Anyone in the world can have an opinion of you and of course anyone in the world can dislike you as well. You must be wondering why I am taking such a pessimistic stance today. If I find blogging a chore why bother to continue?
I don't mean it that way. Just that the idea of blogging being an online diary is all just bulls***. What you write online is not for your own viewing or even just for a few close friends. It is open for the world to see. I have to write politically correct stuff, if not I would incur the wrath of the people whom I just offended through my ideas in this blog. Let's say if I was to declare that I am a supporter of Nazism and I am Anti-semitic, wont there be an uproar?
Yet this is my supposed "online diary". I am free to say anything I want. If I believe that Jews are the cost of this world's problems, who is to cross-examine me? Everybody in the world are entitled the right to their beliefs and practices. Isn't that what the USA want the world to believe in? The triumph of democracy over the evils of socialism and communism?
But somehow the principles of this theory never gets carried out in the practice. People are still unable to fully accept free speech especially if they are the subject of that guy's criticism. They would still react and hit back twice as hard. This is called revenge. That is why somethings just cannot be said. It is shameful to wash your dirty linen in the public and to expose the darkest of secrets on blogs is to welcome hell to your doorstep. There is still no clear dichotomy between cyber and reality. After all, it is how people think in reality that creates the things in the cyber world.
What am I driving at here? I am trying to say that what people cannot find in you as a person in reality, they can know the whole truth of you in this cyberworld of blogging. It complements each other. So if you treat blogs as something of an "online diary", better keep your thoughts politically correct. You will not want the whole world to turn against you if you do not keep your thoughts that way. This is a fact of life, democracy or not. We just have to live with it.

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