ARE WE NICER ON THE BLOG THAN IN REAL LIFE?

(picture from http://easyquestion.net/thinkagain/2010/01/)

Do you think you’re a nicer person on your blog than you are in real life?? This question was raised by an article I read this week and it intrigued me! Do we all have a ‘persona’ that we put forward on our blogs, that is only made up of the bits of us we are happy for other people to read?

Or is the opposite sometimes true – that people put all their most prejudiced views on their blogs – so they might be nicer in real life, if we only knew them U-(

It’s true that things can be misunderstood on blogs. One person’s ‘airing frustrations’ might be another person’s ‘ranting’. So the potential for misunderstanding each other is probably infinite |-|

Terence Blacker reckons that ‘I am nicer behind the screen than I am in real life – more tolerant, less gabby, wittier, kinder. If someone is rude to me, I try to respond in a dignified tone, or simply rise above the insult. These things rarely happen in the real, physical world.’

He goes on ‘There is always the worry that someone who knows me online will be disappointed by my more garrulous, less interesting non-digital self’.

I suppose on the blog we can be more measured in our responses, if we want to: we can take time to think about what somebody’s said, and decide what we want to reply. As he says, this doesn’t usually happen in real life – we can get worked up and blurt something out that we then regret!

Also, in blogworld we can even change our responses. If we don’t like what we’ve said, or what someone else has said, we can go back and delete it or edit it. We can’t do that in the real world. Even when we try and make something right in the ‘real world’, the original comment will always be there, in somebody else’s mind, or in our own.

It’s a fascinating thought. What do you make of it?

(From Terence Blacker Notebook Independent 2 March 2012)