On oversharing, transparency, and other things that feel foreign to me

Susan Mernit did a writeup on her panel with Viviane at Arse Electronika and quoted me a bit.

I still say that I agree with Bonnie Ruberg on this one.

I love many of the social networking platforms I use because I get such a huge amount of support from them. Blogging, of late, is not really one of those, but I still love it and probably always will, though think I'm infinitely better at cupcake blogging than the personal kind. And I get that to some extent, yes, I am part of that world, I do write about my personal life, but I also lately am craving a lot more solitude and a break from New York. It may not be this big, bad, beautiful city's fault, I may be the source of the problem(s), but I feel like it's worth mixing things up a little to see what I could be, who I could be, in some other place.

Check out Susan's post for what I, Nick Douglas, Violet Blue, and Melissa Gira have to say. Here's a snippet:

Rachel Kramer Bussel

--Do you feel you're public figure and you need to let everyone what's going on with you, or do you feel you have over shared at times?
I don't think of myself as a public figure so much as I know I have lots of friends and acquaintances as well as readers who I don't know who appreciate knowing what I'm up to. That being said, though, I think I've always written, online and off, as a mechanism first and foremost for me to sort out my thoughts. Sharing them is almost secondary.

Once you get used to sharing in a certain way, whether it's via blog or Twitter, and you do add a level of openness, it's hard to back down from that without people thinking something is wrong. That can start a vicious cycle where you spend inordinate amounts of time posting when you could be doing other more productive things, so I think the key is finding a balance, one I'm pretty sure I haven't yet struck.