Can the blogosphere help integrate the personal and political?

Rob Richards’ latest blog entry, “The painted bunting,” discusses the pain of a relationship’s end. In the quarter century I’ve lived in Olympia I don’t recall ever having read a similar essay in a local “political” publication. Why is that?

My guess: We activist types like to say that the personal is the political, but that seems to be limited to our consumptive choices. In the likes of Green Pages or Works In Progress we virtually never write about the challenges in our relationships. About the joys and anguish we experience while moving through the different stages of our lives. Hell, when was the last time you saw a local political publication even talk about feelings? All that is apparently left to the “New Age” publications, but they tend to focus on selling psycho-spiritual shiny things.

I get that effective activism has an instrumental side. We seek to accomplish X. We’re all busy, so how can we do that most efficiently? That inevitably means creating clear boundaries between our political and personal roles.

The problem is when we view each other as merely activist warriors. Once someone is wounded we tend to cart them off the field and find a new warrior. That model of organizing may work okay in an urban area, where there is a seemingly endless supply of new faces. But what about in a small community like ours? Can we afford to discard each other like old magazines? Short answer: Nope.

You can’t cultivate a more “sustainable” activist community without bringing the personal back into the political. That means creating the space to talk about our lives. This isn’t as easy to do as it sounds. It takes a certain amount of psych0logical literacy to cultivate a healthy discussion that doesn’t devolve into self indulgence. Among national publications I’d argue that The Sun magazine is one of the best models.

I partly mention The Sun to suggest that the print medium doesn’t necessarily have to be impersonal. However, Rob Richards’ blog is illustrative of how the Internet allows new ways for us to communicate with each other. Alas, Emmett O’Connell recently lamented in a comment on Everyday Olympia that local blog content has dropped off in recent years.

Might this partly reflect the rise of Facebook, which can be a safer means of sharing personal stories than on a blog? Unless you have a large blog, we’re not talking about “mass communication” in the same vein as writing an article for Green Pages, which is read by thousands of people. However, with a blog you possess relatively little control over your readership.

As a case in point, this blog entry will likely be read by less than 100 people. However, I’ll never know who most of those readers are. Anyone anywhere in the world could view this posting — and in some fashion it may be accessible for the rest of my life. As Evgeny Morozov notes in his disturbing book, The Net Delusion, one needs to carefully think through the implications of this type of exposure.

This is one reason why I don’t see the blogosphere as a therapeutic tool. It’s too dangerous. But there’s also a literary issue at play. The Sun’s longtime Editor and Publisher Sy Safransky has noted that writing for personal growth is different than writing for publication. The former focuses on catharsis whereas the latter on effectively communicating with people who may be very different than you. That makes it a literary endeavor even if one is dashing off a short nonfiction blog post while eating breakfast.

So will the blogosphere help us reintegrate the personal and the political? It can if we muster the courage to step outside of our activist roles and talk about what it means to be human. For that we owe Rob Richards a measure of gratitude for helping show the way.

Tagged: activist warrior model, Emmett O'Connell, Green Pages, Rob Richards, The Net Delusion, The Sun, Works In Progress

Posted in: Local media, Personal growth, Public service