I just finished watching tonight’s episode of House, and so there will be spoilers.
Tonight’s episode of House focused around a woman with mysterious symptoms who blogs about everything in her life. Her boyfriend hates that she blogs literally about everything in her life, including him. Thus, the questions are raised about the nature of privacy and the nature of relationships over the internet. There is no question that using a blog makes it easier to discuss parts of one’s life that could never be discussed face to face.
As many of you know I don’t use my blog to discuss personal issues; I once used a Xanga and live journal in my attempts to discuss my personal life. Yet some people do use their blog as a way of communication with the rest of the world because the problems with real relationships create too much drama that can be all but eliminated through online relationships.The internet, and in particular blogs, have offered a chance for older teenagers, and adults to keep online “journals” that the average girl keeps in a private diary. In older times people lived in small towns where the personal details of each others lives were public discourse. As modern society developed, and people moved away from the small towns and into the city where families have grown smaller and smaller we have chosen to expose our lives to perfect strangers the world over. Human beings are by nature political beings, that is we strive for personal relationships and when we have intentionally separated ourselves from that ability to create relationships we find other means of reaching out.
But is there such a thing as using blogs and the internet too much? At one point in my life I lived online; I was online day after day for hours upon hours. In tonight’s House, the woman blogs about every detail of her life allowing everyone who is online to not only view her life, but the life of her boyfriend, and her views on the doctors around her at the hospital. She has become dependent on the internet, on her blog and the approval of her readers. Today I spoke with my friend Ashok about attempting to find more and more readers. This is the pitfall of the blog and the internet in general. We don’t just strive for relationships, but we want approval of the world. Like anything, the internet can be addicting to the point where we divorce ourselves from the real world in exchange for the creating reality we can make for ourselves online through blogs, chat rooms, facebook, etc. Blogs are a great way to help share ideas that are marginalized by the main stream. However, when we place our lives at the mercy of blogs and attempt to make them that much more important that they rule our lives they are a danger. Instead, we should recognize that blogs in the end while beneficial in many ways, are not worth living on them. Eventually, the patient in House is forced to limit her blogging or lose her real relationship; not everything should be made public for the whole world.
