"You have a website, don't you?"

A few fellow Antenna-transmitters have been answering the question "who knows that you blog?"

This is a topic I care about quite a bit, evidenced by the fact that I've written about it quite a bit. Two years ago I think my overarching theme was what I'd call "virtual embodiment," to embody who you are in real life on the internet, or to embody who you are on the internet in real life. At the time I was writing quite a bit and it bothered me that I felt more myself as a disembodied voice in gemspace, or that this was becoming who I wanted to be, neglecting who I am.

In one moment, I started to think that I needed to replace my manufactured voice on the web with the one that felt more like my own. So, I started mirroring my gemlog posts over HTTP:

That was just over two years ago now. "How it's going" is probably best described by something a friend said to me a few weeks ago:

You have a website, don't you?

To answer the question posed at the beginning of this article, people in the real world kind of know that I'm a blogger. It's not a secret. My partner reads my articles sometimes. There's a few other people in my life who've read a few of my articles before. When others gripe about social media, I'm often quick to say that the most personally meaningful online community I've ever felt a part of is the "blogosphere" (gemlogosphere??), that there still are people maintaining active blogs and we're having a great time.

I do kind of want people in my life to read what I write because I'm a kind of shy person; I want to be able to open up to people more easily but to this day I find it much easier to talk about how I feel on the internet. Evidently, my website has become a big part of who I feel I am. I wouldn't call it "required reading" because that feels a bit egotistical but I do often feel acutely aware of the fact that there's a big part of my life most of the people I know aren't really aware of. Coming from a moment where I didn't feel like I was all that good at expressing myself,¹ all the while doing it every single day on the internet, it almost felt like I was leading two separate lives.

When it's all said and done, the Wired is just a medium of communication and the transfer of information. You mustn't confuse it with the real world.

It's a bit more clear to me now that there's no singular Thing you can do on the internet to transform who you are in the real world. You still need the willingness to become who you want to be offline.

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