Untitled - witz cultural

8'lRECONFIGURINCTHE TEXTsites with some of the information for which I was looking, but among the topentries appeared one from the blog of a young woman enumerating her sexualexperiences (I hadn t meant that "how many"!). Her entry, which appearedas a separate lexia, contained links to another blog with similar material, andwhen I clicked on the link in the original blog labeled "Home," I found a sitewhose contents reminded me ofthe HBO television show "Sex andthe City"-more for the comedy, though, than the sex. Although the blogger identifiesherself only as "Blaise K. ," she includes enough personal information, includingphotographs and the asserLion that she is black and fewish, that heranon;rnity doesnt seem very well protected. I assume the blogger intendsthe site for her friends, but Google mistakenly brought me there, as it maywell bring her parents and employers. It is very difficult to maintain this kindofpublic privacy.McNeill points out that such sites "often reinforce the stereotype of thediary as a genre for unbridled narcissism" because they assume that otherpeople care about what bloggers have to say. That narcissism, McNeill admits,often turns out be justified, for some online diaries receive thousandsof visitors and make their authors famous. They also place the author's remarksabout private matters in a very public space. In fact, one of the mostinteresting effects of blogging lies in the way it unsettles our accustomed bordersbetween the private and public spheres. "In their immediacy and accessibility,in their seemingly unmediated state, Web diaries blur the distinctionbetween online and offiine lives, 'virnral reality' and 'real life,' 'public' and'private,' and most intriguingly for auto/biography studies, between the lifeand the text" (McNeill, 25). Those blogs that accept comments allow McNeillclaims, the "reader of an online diary" to participate activelyin constructing the texthe diarist writes, and the identities he or she takes on in thenarrative. Though active and even intimate, however, that participation remains virtual,disembodied. The confessor stays behind the "grille" of the Internet, allowingthe diarist*and the reader-the illusion of anonymity necessary for "full" selfexposure.Janet Murray notes that "some people put things on their home page ...that they have not told their closest friends. The enchantment ofthe computer createsfor us a public space that also feels very private and inti mate" (99). .. For the onlinediarist, having readers means that the diarist has both .joined and created communities,acts that inform the texts he or she will produce. (27,32)Many bloggers dont in fact allow comments, or else they screen them,and some intend their online diaries solely for a circle of friends and controlaccess to them by using passwords. Nonetheless, once an entry goes online,