Meta: online writing

I’m a sucker for all things meta: the stuff that’s about the “about” rather than about the “stuff”.  If you see what I mean.

Those other bloggers amongst you who like to think about why and how you do what you do, should go read this essay by Caleb Crane about writing online.  I came to it via Slate, which I came to via Bookforum.  Just so everyone gets their due credit.

Crane, a long-time blogger, makes some smart observations about the good reasons why we have public and private faces, about how the internet blurs the distinctions between them, and why this may not be a good thing.

Online space is very public, in contrast to the private intimacy between text and reader that you get in printed fiction or poetry.  Online writers tend to overcompensate for this by publicly dropping their guard, losing their formality and loosening their style.  However, the hoped-for intimacy never arrives in return: as Crane puts it, “The environment remains dangerous. One skips through no-man’s-land in one’s pyjamas, as it were.”

Go read.