This weekend at BlogHer08 I kept thinking that maybe I was going to the wrong panels. They were interesting, and had a few new tidbits, but none of them were giving me the “wow” that you want to leave a conference with. So I decided that I must be doing something wrong, and I should go to something completely different. I went to “Can we take back naked blogging?”
And then, as these things usually are: it was great. I closed my laptop and focused, and wrote notes that I knew would be a blog post.
The premise was this: a panel of three women who had stepped back from the intimacy of their lifeblogs after intimidating or scary experiences when that intimacy was abused. Several of the women on stage and in the audience spoke of their blogs as their “living rooms,” and that when these incidents occurred, they lost their sense of security on the internet, with their blogs. I was captivated.
Now here’s the thing. I worked at Planned Parenthood for eight years, and what I learned there was this: the Internet is a scary place. There are terrible awful people out there, and the minute you reveal one detail about yourself is the day you come home and open your apartment door to find a fundamentalist with a shotgun. No matter where you live, no matter how liberal your city, no matter how safe you think you are, if you tell the Internet anything about your life, we cannot protect you.
While part of this was a command and control attitude (“if you get a call from the press, immediately forward it to the communications manager. Under no circumstances should you talk to the press”), a lot of it was for our safety. I was working at Planned Parenthood when we went through Anthrax threats and all of the mail had to by x-rayed and opened by security guards in masks. I worked there when we had a bomb threat and went into lock down, so that snipers couldn’t kill us as we evacuated. I worked there when Clayton Wagner escaped from jail and threatened that “it doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re a receptionist or a doctor, I will follow you home and kill you. I will not kill you at work, because at work you are safe; I will kill you at home, where you are more vulnerable.”
I took it seriously, because I worked in the LeAnn Nichols and Shannon Lowney building, because people would take my photo driving into the parking garage to post on a site with dripping blood, because our chief medical officer wore a bulletproof vest to work. In Boston. Yeah, right down the street from B.U. So I never had a sense of security on the web, or ever felt like the Internet was my living room.
Watching the panel, I guess I felt a little jealous. I only started blogging when I got to EchoDitto, and it’s always been professional, for a job. I’ve never posted anything personal about myself, really, and I wonder a little what it would be like to expose my most personal secrets to the public… and get feedback. It seems both liberating and terrifying.
But I don’t think I could ever get there, and it kind of makes me sad. Once, after the fake anthrax attacks to Congress, our CEO at Planned Parenthood said that she was sad because she’d always hoped that there would be a day when we’d get to roll back our security measures and be like other workplaces, but that that world seemed to be going the other way, and other workplaces were having to increase their security to match ours.
It feels a little bit like blogging. I wish the Internet could be a place where we could be our true, full selves all the time, without worrying about death threats, or attacks on our children, or harassing commenters. And I wonder what it will take to get us to that place. Maybe this is where we start, by saying out loud that that is where we want to go.
