{"id":3042,"date":"2013-05-10T17:15:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-11T00:15:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/?p=3042"},"modified":"2016-03-27T15:48:10","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T22:48:10","slug":"the-self-conscious-blogger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/the-self-conscious-blogger\/","title":{"rendered":"The self-conscious blogger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"I<\/a>Blogging makes me uncomfortable, but it\u2019s a discomfort that interests me. It\u2019s not the discomfort itself I find interesting (especially my own), but the experience of being a self in a public space, the self-consciousness that engenders, and the reflection that provokes on what it\u2019s like to be a conscious self. <\/p>\n

When I first started blogging, I didn\u2019t feel self-conscious. I was probably too preoccupied with identifying and pursuing my subject matter. Within the first year, however, the idea of \u201cthe self-conscious blogger\u201d started to appear regularly in my private journal. Why am I doing this? Should I be accomplishing something? How much should I care about not accomplishing what I only vaguely perceive as my intention? <\/p>\n

Self-consciousness is usually associated with self-presentation: How am I perceived by others? How does that make me feel? I had no interest in blogging about my personal self, i.e., my private life. By the time I\u2019d accumulated a year\u2019s worth of posts, however, I could see that 1) my choice of subject matter revealed my interests and 2) what my interests conveyed was an incomplete picture of how I understood myself. <\/p>\n

Externalizing my thoughts in a blog allowed me to see myself. While I didn\u2019t necessarily dislike what I saw, I felt like I\u2019d fenced myself into a small plot of land in an infinitely large garden. All too frequently the flora and fauna looked more interesting on the other side of my voluntarily created fence.<\/p>\n

Expectations of the imagined reader<\/h3>\n

Part of the problem may have been that I was not an expert writing about specialized knowledge. If I had been, I might have been satisfied to limit myself to a well-defined topic. With health as my basic subject matter, I was free to pursue many of my interests. In addition to healthism, healthy lifestyles, personal responsibility for health, and neoliberalism, I wrote about antibiotic resistant bacteria, cosmetic surgery, the pharmaceutical industry, medicalization, overdiagnosis, the doctor\/patient relationship, the impact of climate change on health, death, tobacco, inequality, and the social determinants of health. And for most of 2009, I couldn\u2019t very well avoid writing about US health care reform.<\/p>\n

Somehow that wasn\u2019t enough. And this is where the self-consciousness came in. To write in public — as in a blog or any other social media — is to be aware of the potential reader. As a writer, I had developed the habit of taking the viewpoint of the reader. This happened to me during a stint as a technical writer in the computer industry, an occupation that requires imagining yourself as a na\u00efve reader who knows zip about what you need to explain. <\/p>\n

In my blog, I felt that my accumulated content created an expectation in the reader of what my subject matter would continue to be. This expectation existed solely in my own head, yet I found it constraining. I didn\u2019t feel free to deviate from the imagined expectation of an imaginary reader.<\/p>\n

Of course it\u2019s also possible that, over the course of several years, I simply outgrew my initial subject matter. I know my interests change over time and that I have a history of not staying with one career — let alone one set of interests — for very long. (This actually relates to my Chinese horoscope; more on that later<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Learning in public<\/h3>\n

What made me most self-conscious about blogging was what I came to call \u201clearning in public.\u201d As I say, I\u2019m not an expert, and yet I live in a culture that places a high value on expertise. I\u2019m an ex-academic, and it\u2019s embarrassing for academics to reveal in their writings \u2013 over which they presumably have full control — what they don\u2019t know about the subject they\u2019ve freely chosen to discuss. It elicits a tut-tut.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m always interested in new things. I enjoy intellectual stimulation. I wanted to use blogging to learn about new things. I wanted to learn by the very process of writing (a form of active learning<\/a>). I saw other bloggers I admired summarizing books they\u2019d just read, providing value to both themselves and their readers in the process. I wanted to do that too. But by the time I recognized the constraint I was imposing on myself, such a change felt inconsistent with my sense of the blog \u2013 perhaps more accurately, inconsistent with the self I felt I had conveyed.<\/p>\n

It’s been over a year ago now since I wrote something that I hoped would clarify my thinking on this (see the next post<\/a>). I considered posting it on my obscure Tumblr blog, but I wasn\u2019t ready to be even that public on the subject of learning in public. <\/p>\n

Now it seems that I am. I started my previous blog in 2008. That\u2019s quite a while ago. I\u2019ve changed. In this new blog, I hope to give myself permission to learn in public to my heart\u2019s content.<\/p>\n

Related posts<\/strong>:<\/p>\n

Can we think outside our culture: My Chinese horoscope<\/a>
\nLearning in public<\/a><\/p>\n

Image source<\/strong>: This Good Steward<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Blogging makes me uncomfortable, but it\u2019s a discomfort that interests me. It\u2019s not the discomfort itself I find interesting (especially my own), but the experience of being a self in a public space, the self-consciousness that engenders, and the reflection that provokes on what it\u2019s like to be a conscious self. When I first started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,99],"tags":[104,108,100,103,102,105,114],"class_list":["post-3042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-self","tag-active-learning","tag-blogging","tag-healthism","tag-self-consciousness","tag-self-presentation","tag-social-media","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3042"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4332,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3042\/revisions\/4332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.janhenderson.com\/self\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}