Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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Jeffrey Rosen recaps recent sex scandals in blogging. He cites the case of former FCC chair Reed Hundt, who ran afoul of student bloggers when he spoke at Yale Law School.
"Once burned, twice shy," Hundt said, reflecting about his experience. "I no longer try in any group larger than two or three people to establish any rules of confidentiality at all: what are you going to do, ask people to sign pieces of paper?" Hundt said he has abandoned the idea that he can control his audiences and assumes that everything he says might be posted.
I had two reactions to this passage, one immediate and one delayed, and they are perhaps contradictory. (Some of my thinking may have been influenced by the chapters of Albert Ellis that I recorded at RFB&D yesterday,) First came a resolution that I should do nothing that I would be ashamed of or embarrassed by, if someone should blog it. A tall order, especially when I consider that Leta is blogonomically active. How to navigate, for example, the uncomfortable situation last week when I bailed out on a group that was decamping from Shirlington to Crystal City for post-show drinks? But mostly this is about letting go of hangups about what people know about me. I had an acting teacher once who said (greatly paraphrased), "Your friends already know all your dirty little secrets, so don't waste any energy here trying to conceal them." A related resolution is that I shouldn't be embarrassed by something I've written about online, irrespective of who's reading. This is a sticky wicket, too. How do I feel about owning up to certain pop culture predilections or political opinions, when I know that a prospective employer might be googling me? Even more difficult is criticism of someone's creative work. I've received messages from strangers thanking me for praise; how many others have been bruised or annoyed by my critique, subjective and ill-informed as it is? The later reaction was the re-realization that just because I personally avoid or pursue a particular behavior, it doesn't follow that other people should feel compelled to follow suit. That way lies the reasoning, "if you have nothing to hide from the police, then you shouldn't object to at-random searches nor nationwide identity documents." I am only responsible for myself; I am only responsible to each one of us. posted: 8:14:51 PM |
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It's a bit of a dog-bites-man piece, but still linkworthy: Michael Wilson reports on the pernicious effects of piped-in holiday music on retail workers.
"After about five minutes it gets old real fast," [Robert Sanders, stacking shirts in the SoHo Banana Republic] said. "If you're here for, like, eight hours, I don't see how you don't go outside and kill a snowman or something."
posted: 9:48:03 AM |
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Howler of the week, interspecies brooding division: a New York Times photo caption identifies a chick of Pale Male and Lola, the Fifth Avenue Red-Tailed Hawks, as a "gosling." Hmm. I wonder why we don't have "hawklet," by analogy with "owlet." posted: 9:43:44 AM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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