http://violenceunsilenced.com/nic/

My dad taught me that with every freedom comes responsibility. I wonder if her parents mentioned this to her? If she will mention it to her son?

Didn’t Dooce do the same exact thing more or less against Maytag or some such washing machine company over a repair man providing inadequate service and a clothes washer being crappy? Didn’t she get rewarded for her actions with a free washer, which she donated to a shelter? As long as bloggers get bennies for sticking up for themselves, more and more are going to do the same. In a country where a congressman can shout at the President of the United States and call him a liar, how can we expect the average blogger to behave any better?

When it comes to the truth, there is your truth, my truth, and the facts…which can be interpreted in many different ways. As for what the “truth” is in any given situation…sometimes I think it is pretty self evident, and sometimes we really don’t have enough information to pass judgment. (which is how I feel about the whole TSA thing).

This is where the second point of fascination comes in for me — the role or place that blogs might hold in the canon of the written word — do we hold blogs to the same standard that we might apply to ‘hard copy’ published prose? I used to teach a Creative Nonfiction course — and as person whose graduate degree was in fiction I was fascinated by the discourse constantly circling the entire genre of memoir — which, though it’s been around forever, really began to explode ten years ago or so. I knew the rules of fiction — those I understood — but how to reach back into one’s memory to replicate events that one has no way of truly corroborating? Do we constantly have to leave disclaimers, as Ivan Doig does at the beginning of his memoir” This House of Sky” — concerning the notorious mercurial nature of human memory — how this retelling may not be what another person remembers but it’s how we best imagine it happened….

Not to get totally off-track — because there are clear examples, like April Rose, of a blogger intentionally creating a false world and reaping the benefits of the community formed around it — but there is murkier territory when we start talking about the nature of truth in the blog as memoir form. I always told my students that to be totally forthright as a writer you should couch things subtly “I don’t remember exactly what passed between them but in my mind in the years since I’ve always believed it went somehow like this…”

I think the question of truth always hits me personally in part because I’ve blogged so much about my own family’s soap-opera like story — every bit of it the truth as I know it — and it was wrenching and cathartic and powerful to do it — and the idea of someone taking advantage of the kind spirit of most people out there really does sadden me — but too I understand this is a medium that has no true boundaries, no expectations — and that makes navigating these questions particularly challenging.

Sorry for being a comment hog.

To Mel: I think there are plenty of blogs used as weapons – political, social (like TMZ), and personal. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. I just know that the possibility exists that someone is trying to make a point. I also know that what I do in my private life can affect my credibility – I learned this in my career. I doubt, however, that most people ever need to learn this lesson, although it is starting to become an issue with employers searching social networking sites. Regardless of whether this woman is telling the truth, she will probably be portrayed as a crazy woman from now on. She admits to panic attacks and emergency Xanax, and TSA essentially accuses her of lying and attention seeking. There is no good way to salvage her reputation here. I think that is the power of blogging that people don’t always consider.