The Too-Much-Information Age

I'm extremely grateful that weblogs were not around when I was the caught in the perfect storm of raging hormones, youthful inexperience, and clumsy romantic yearning.

In 1986 I spent an entire semester obsessed with a red-haired nape perched inches in front of me in a cramped history class at Richland Junior College. I quietly plotted for months, finally asking the nape's owner for a study date in a nauseous mumble, and she shot me down before I got all of the words out.

Given a worldwide publishing medium and the right content management tools, I would have blogged about that future mother of my children for days on end. She could have printed it out to obtain a restraining order.

In an entry that was deleted after it had crossed the globe via the magic of syndication, a weblogger in college recently described his first sexual experience in a manner likely to prevent a second one.

The object of his affection, linked in the entry, was a blogger too. She was so angry that she berated his weblog readers for not telling him the obvious -- you really ought to think carefully before giving the complete play-by-play of a sexual encounter, especially on a site that's being read by her mother.

Unfortunately, the blogosphere is a harsh mistress. The entry has made it into two caches, another weblog, and countless aggregators.

There really is no more inopportune place for moments of ill-considered candor than a well-read weblog that supports syndication.

Publishing · 2005/03/05 · 0 COMMENTS · Link