One of the other things which contributed to the end of my blogging last time was a stifling self-censorship. It was a continual monkey on my back and made me second guess everything I wrote. I've been thinking about how I'm going to deal with it this time around. Because if anything, I feel that the imperative for self-censorship is even stronger now
Due to where I am working, I am bound by certain rules which are directly relevant to my blogging and other social media activity. It is safer if I do not even name these rules here, just out of caution that any comment on them may be viewed as critical. This post is not a critique by me of these rules. I accept that these rules apply and I just considering how I can best comply with them.
Please note that even if you have a notion of what rules I am referring to, do not to mention them in any comments on this blog. If there is any way of interpreting your comment as being critical of these rules, I am obligated to delete the comment, or I may be viewed as endorsing the criticism.
You may be wondering, is there any point blogging in this environment? Is everything going to be so sanitised that the only topics I can safely discuss is music and my favourite bands, so long as this music is not too controversial?
To be honest, it would easier and safer for me not to blog in this environment. I have decided it is precisely because of these difficulties, that it has become even more important for me to persist.
Sometimes I'll need to be more vague than I would like to. At other times, I may discuss issues at a fairly high level, despite my preference getting into the nitty gritty details. There will be topics when I will need to try to be neutral to a fault, and not express my own passionately held views. When I blogged before, I set various rules for myself. In the name of self-preservation, all of these rules are going out the window.
Is it all going to be worth it? I hope so. I think that there are still a lot of library and information issues which I can discuss in this environment.
Also, I have developed a safety valve for the words which I feel could problematic. Instead of self-censoring and just not writing them, which tends to just shut down my whole creative process, I am now writing them privately. I hope that one day, the environment may change and I will be able to publish them. Alternatively, when I change jobs or retire, it's possible that I may be able to publish them then.
I am also open to sharing the full posts on a one-to-one basis via encrypted channels. If you would like to see the non-published version of this post, please email me at [email protected] - except with explodedlibrary in the first part of the address.
I don't want to over-dramatize and over-sell the unpublished content. There are various levels of constraints which bind me. The unpublished blog content is just my response to the most external layer of these constraints, but I still bound by deeper constraints, no matter what format I use. To use a canine analogy: It's not as if I'm unleashed in the unpublished versions of posts, but I'm on a nice extended and retractable leash, not on a short leash.
For what may be obvious reasons, I hope that this is the first and only I will address this issue. I just thought that it was important to draw a big line to separate my current blogging from my past blogging.