For those of us who like to write, having a blog can be, as I'm sure we agree, a wonderful incentive to practice this skill. Our blogs can take a variety of flavours, depending on our tastes and purposes: from diary-esque dealings of our daily lives, to predominantly informative blogs detailing the current goings on in the world at large, to my own aim for my blog as a sort of playground for me to play with language and with ideas and subjects that I find interesting. However, one aspect of the form which remains constant is that it is predominantly a public medium. Although we have the option to publish our articles privately - either for our friends enjoyment, or only for ourselves - what distinguishes blogs from diaries (besides being digital as opposed to physical) and so provides their purpose for being is the ability of their being published for everyone on the internet to visit and read.
In such a situation, we as bloggers must be aware of this fact and of the responsibility we must exercise towards (can we be responsible towards? It's not necessarily for) our audience. Personally, I have little interest in peeping into people's personal diaries, prefering much rather to respect their privacy than to pry, and so it is with blogs, with my shying well away from entirely personal detailings of people's waking, eating, walkling, shagging, worrying, sleeping habits, in preference to blogs intented to, if not stimulate educational/intellectual thought, at least to entertain with creativity. This may be my own personal taste, and I acknowledge the possibility of some people positively feasting and thriving on the goriest of outpourings, thus the question arises: how intimate and revealing can we be before it becomes merely turgid self-important waffling? Particularly on the subject of our mental woes, what are we to do with those? It is said by psychologists that a good way to relieve any psychological pains is to put them into words and write them down. But surely the intention is entirely personal, and not to be for public consumption via a blog. My own method, in the context of my blogging activities, is merely to touch briefly on these issues, drifing past them in the course of writing about something which I feel is more suitable (i.e. entertaining) for my audience, especially using euphemisms so as not to jarr and appear too incongruous in the midst of the article. Not that I'm uninterested or afraid of writing about my psychological state, I just feel it would be one of the more self-indulgent subjects about which I could write, and wouldn't make very good reading.
Thus the question: Are we completely entitled to write about our woes (you see, a euphemism), or are they much too personal for public consumption?
