Breaking the Trend

While I really should be sleeping right now since I got up at some weird-as hour this morning (i.e. 4am) to finish off the third last assignment of my university career, I am blogging instead. This is completely and utterly a break from the trend. What trend? Well, apart from the most recent entry of my post-BN speech, my posts have been almost devoid of personal references. Why so? I have issues. Privacy issues. Who reads this stuff? Why break my silence now?

The answer is: I have no answer. Once upon a time I would have kept a regularly and faithfully updated personal blog to detail every major (or minor) events of my life. After a while it became a total drag. Blogging for the sake of blogging, with no real content. It was somewhat like a shopping list... Who really cares about what I had for breakfast? Just kidding, I didn't actually talk about that. But I probably would have recounted things that are just as trivial.

Blogging is a dangerous fad. You do it just because everyone else is. You can put your foot right in where it doesn't belong and burn yourself senseless with scalding hot water. Watch what you say coz it could get around the web-neighbourhood faster than you can say "boo". If rumours travel at the speed of a bullet, then stupid things unskillfully posted on blogs travel even faster and can come back around and bite you on where the sun don't shine.

As a self-protection strategy, I wisely chose to be silent - or relatively silent. Sometimes things are better left unsaid and untold. Knowledge can be burden, and knowledge that others have too much knowledge about you can be even more of a burden. Are you really ok with people knowing more about you than you know about them? Is this emotional exhibitionism in the age of Blogs any different to exposing yourself in public?

Just like what TV-show police say when they make arrests, "You may choose to remain silent but anything you say can and will be held against you" (or something like that) - the same can be said for Blogs. Or any written communication for that matter. How many times have you shown personal emails or MSN chats to your friends. How many times do you think the same thing has been done to you without your knowledge? Scary.

Anything documented in written form can be a double-edge sword. While they do provide records and evidence of things that would easily escape our faulty memories, they are in fact also records and evidence of incriminating information that you may have unintentionally let slip because at the time you did not realise what impact it could have. Or fallen into the wrong hands... I shiver at the thought.

This is precisely the reason why professionals try to communicate (in written format) as diplomatically as they can in the business world. Just in case they get served. Let's try not to leave room for any alternative explanations of the words, phrases, sentences, and emoticons you may have included. But of course, nothing is fool-proof.

Humans have this incredible ability to read between the lines, the dots and even the spaces between letters. Admit it, you're guilty of doing that at some stage. "Hm... That capital letter there... Is he mad at me?", "Wow.. that emoticon there, she's in love with me now" and etc, etc. Sound familiar? Nothing is straight-forward with online communication these days. Misunderstandings are rampant, much worse than face-to-face communications...

After my little rant, I have realised that I still have not really made a lot of personal references i.e. events in my life. More so about my current views on the world of online and written communications. So hah, I have not broken my "silence" still. So this is not really breaking the trend.

Now is it?