Levels of Blogging Reality

I recently spoke with a guy who got fired because he made some vague, stupid jokes about his workplace on his blog (I know this guy through my friend Mike). He, like every blogger, had adopted a persona, and his persona happened to involve making jaunty jokes. Some people at work read it, not really in the whimsical-friendly-voyeuristic spirit of blogging, more like in the negative spirit of factual snooping. They failed to realize that what the blogger was saying was said more to entertain an assumed, intimate audience that to actually reflect any actual reality. This poor fellow's snoopy co-workers made the same mistake a fiction fan does when they assume that every description and thought a novel's main character expresses is truly the author's own. (And this blogger's mistake was trusting he lived in a just world where everyone posessed a decent sense of humor.)

Since my loud, half-shouted New Year's Eve conversation with this unfortunate blogger, who actually went on to find a much better job that he loves to go to every day, I've been thinking about the levels of being we all assume. There's a reason I refer to myself as Blogagaard on this blog and not David Oppegaard, the Being You Will Encounter in Real Life. I mean, Blogagaard certainly is close to the extrovert side of my personality, but that's not the whole story. I mean, what kind of fucked up story would that be?

As a writer, who daily pushes around fictional characters to bow to my god-like whims, I naturally slipped into the land of blogging. I failed to realize that people would be out there reading my blog who took it all seriously. Sure, some of it's serious, but as always there are levels of seriousness, levels of reality that should be accounted for when you read anything any a blogger puts up. Today I poked around blogspot's help center and found essays seriously titled "How to Not Get Fired Because of Your Blog" and "How to Use Your Blog to Get Published". These blogs, I tell ya. It's as if someone passed out RPG launchers to a bunch of ten year olds, gave them just enough instructions so each kid could fire one in any direction they chose, and then stepped back to see what would happen.

(Note to future senate investigators looking for dirt on Blogagaard: You suck! This is what you're doing with your miserable life? How trite!)


20 comments:

Voix said...

Yes -- I can totally relate. I am Voix and Michele, but sometimes it is hard for even my own self to distinguish the difference.

Kelly Coyle said...

Not me. Mr. Authenticity.

David Oppegaard said...

You see? Is Kelly joking or serious? Levels upon levels.

Something dirty said...

This is why I cling to the vestiges of anonymity. But I think I am pretty much the same in real life.

David Oppegaard said...

Michele, maybe you should literally wear two different hats when you write as Michele and when you write as the Voix. This might not work, but it is a good excuse to buy some new hats.

David Oppegaard said...

SD, you are nothing like a turtle in real life. That's crazy.

Wait. Are you secretly a turtle? Are YOU Jerry?

Kelly Coyle said...

There isn't really an authentic self and a presentation self. Those are just two stories that you claim, one of which you happen to believe. When we do things that contradict the story we are claiming at the time, we say things like "I wasn't myself" or "That's the booze talking," as a way to maintain our front. But who the heck were we, then? What we don't see is that we do the same sorts of things in our psyche, trying to maintain a coherent self against all the available evidence. the work we do to fool others in public is the work we do to fool ourselves in private. Sometimes we "lose it" (what?) as we say, and it falls apart and we panic, or we feel relief at the release of all that work we do.

Amethyst Vineyard said...

I am every bit as critical, narcissistic, and unruly in real life as I am in not-real life.

David Oppegaard said...

This is interesting, a divide between real life/real blog people and real life/artificial blog people. I seem to be in the middle of the scale...

Kelly Coyle said...

There's two other possibilities, Dave; here's all four:

1. Real life, artificial blog: you and Voix, apparently.
2. Real life, real blog: ostensibly me and Am. SD, maybe.
3. Artificial life, real blog: the guy who works in an office faking it all day, and "cuts loose" in his blog.
4. Artificial life, artificial blog: badly in need of therapy.

Kelly Coyle said...

Actually, I take that back. I think #4 is the normal case, and the other three are different flavors of misunderstanding.

David Oppegaard said...

this is all a dream, anyway.

Jeff Smieding said...

"Dream, dream, dream, dream"

-The Everly Brothers

JimiPhoenix said...

I'm the same, dudes and dudettes. But yeah, blogs are cwaaazy shit these days.

Kelly Coyle said...

Jimi is clearly not real.

Something dirty said...

My blogshit is highly selective and heavily edited, so it's necessarily a bit fake in that sense, but it very accurately represents my neuroses.

When I met some of ya'll, I was pleasantly suprised by how familiar you seemed, just from reading your blogs.

Kelly Coyle said...

Santa is real in a sense. UFOs are real in a sense. Thor is real in a sense. Holden Caulfield is real in a sense. I'm sure Jimi is real in a sense too. Like Max Headroom or Robocop.

Amethyst Vineyard said...

You mean Robocop isn't real?

David Oppegaard said...

My friends in high school always told me, "Dave, you can hear Jimi, but you can't see him."
I'd go, "What? Who's Jimi?"
And they'd repeat "Dave, you can hear Jimi, but you can't see him" and then start laughing when I got all confused and frustrated. It was a sentence utterly without meaning. Looking back, it was pretty funny.

David Oppegaard said...

Woah. Anybody see the STar Tribune tonight? Headline is regarding a MN political blogger being sued !

www.startribune.com

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