I looked at my Outlook calendar for the forthcoming week and found it reassuringly empty of meetings and deadlines. That means I can get on with some useful work. In fact I’ll have to because the week after next, starting 31st August, will be very busy. Anyway, I thought I would use the start of this August hiatus to update a post I did more than eight years ago about blogging and privacy.
It was triggered by the following cartoon I saw in The Oldie (which I used to buy for the crossword) and which really struck home.
I can think of quite a few occasions when I’ve met a complete stranger who, by being a reader this blog, seemed to know more about me than I do!
Looking back over the years, admit that there have been a few times when I’ve posted personal things on here that I probably should have kept to myself. On the other hand, a lot of things have happened over the years that I haven’t even mentioned on here. More recently I’ve had very good reason to keep many more personal things to myself. That’s mainly because there’s another person involved who is far more important to me than the blog and who has good reason to dislike all forms of social media. He doesn’t mind me writing a blog. He sometimes even reads it. He just doesn’t want to identified on it, even accidentally.
To start with I felt a bit strange about going somewhere or doing something interesting then not even mentioning it on here. To be honest I felt a bit guilty about being secretive. Then I snapped out of it and realised that there’s nothing at all wrong with keeping private things private for any reason at all, and particularly not if the person you share them with has very good reasons for not wanting to share them with anyone else. Secrecy often implies something bad you want to hide, whereas privacy is just about helping other people to mind their own business.
Looking back over the years, I know I’ve also written tactless items about things I would have been wiser to have left alone and have sometimes caused offence as a result. Everybody makes mistakes, but if you make them on the internet they’re in the public domain forever. Part of the problem is that it’s too easy to forget that people actually read this stuff! On the other hand, I do think at least some of the items I’ve posted have had a positive effect and that, in my mind at least, far outweighs the negatives.
This rambling post (like the one that preceded it) is just a product of the process I go through from time to time, wondering how much longer I want to keep this blog going. Next month In The Dark will be 18 years old, so perhaps I should treat it like an adult and let it make its own decisions! By the time it reaches 20, however, I will have retired and I think that will be a good time to pull down the shutters.
In the Dark 