Carolime Time

CJAD interview with Dan Delmar and the Internet Personality

As some of you may’ve heard, I was interviewed by Dan Delmar Friday night on CJAD radio, in Montreal. I love the guy, we go way back to j-school days at Concordia University, studying journalism. I mean, we are very different from each other in many ways but I think ultimately we share a strong friendship.

I wasn’t sure what to expect with Dan’s interview. He told me he’d be talking to me about blogging and putting ones personal life on the net. It’s a funny question because as much as people say I put out a lot of my personal life online, there are just as many who say I don’t put it out enough.This is where I will explain the history of my writing and blogging, especially since Dan oh-so-kindly referred to me as a celebrity. Perhaps this can go in my Wiki. Oh, the joy.

I think when I first started “blogging,” before I even called it blogging (before I think the word existed), I was simply writing and thinking no one would read my words. It started in notebooks when I was 5y/o, hitting the internet by the time I was 12 on a networking site and on my own website. When I was 18, I took it to a South Asian networking site where I developed my first audience.

In 1997 or ‘98, at 13 or 14, I built my childhood Tripod website for fun and out of boredom, in competition with my  internet friends–that’s right, I had internet friends. It was a venue for me to share my work, and I think it made me realize how important writing and multimedia were to me–I started exchanging poetry with friends, building content for my site, effing around with photos and HTML for lack of a social life. Although it was a personal site, all about me, I didn’t really have much else to write about at the time except for myself and the things going on around me. I had a private diary online, one which I still go to actually and which no one has ever seen. Looking back on it, I can admit most of it was teenage angst, boy-craziness and a great interest in acting.

When I hit the South Asian website, I realized what a rush it is to write for an audience. I started by writing anecdotes. I had an unquelled thirst for Reader’s Digest and Chicken Soup-style writing in my younger years. I guess, deep down, I wanted a venue to share my writing, which was otherwise stuck in books and private diaries. I was addicted to reading and had lots of words piled in my head. It also meant a lot to me to see others relate to my writing–not just because it was a relief for me but because I saw so many people pleased with the fact that they were reading something that comforted them.

So, at first, not knowing better..I would also venture into what I consider personal writing. I.e. discussing publicly my hatred of my ex, fights with my family, etc. After awhile, I started to see how many people are voyeurs and were reading my stuff and decided I wanted to be more private. My writing was not all personal, mind you. A lot of it was motivating or based on my conversations and debates with people on social norms and politics. I described my interactions with people in depth, and this shaped my writing greatly. During my time on the South Asian site, now defunct, I applied for journalism school while secretly wanting to study creative writing and theatre;) There is SOME room for creativity in journalism, though.

At some point in my internet career, I think subconsciously quite early on, I started understanding the nuances and manipulative space for online personality tweaking. At points, this became an obsession for me. For many, many reasons: One: I wanted as much as possible to be myself online and in person, in every way, and Two: I wanted to see how far one could go with being someone else online and someone else in person. I tried not to practice this myself but rather, watch it manifest itself in my peers (social networks) When I was 15, I developed an insecurity that I was cooler online than in person. A friend told me that I was very different online from in person. I didn’t talk to him for a few months after that, as he also made fun of my website. Anyway, the point is, I then decided I would do my best to be myself online.

It sounds masochistic, but I am really curious as to how differently people receive each other online versus in person, how comfortably one may act online versus in person and how much of themselves online is true. I think it’s hard to be a complete lie online, there’s only so far a person can fake, but Google makes these things very easy. On the same note, my daily offline habits also tend towards watching people. I might come off as nosy but I am very scrutinizing of sincerity and genuinity. I am also very capable of faking it when necessary (auditions). I was dying to talk about these subjects on Dan’s CJAD interview, but it went by so quickly and it was also very personal–he read some of my poetry and was very curious as to how I could be so personal online. I was surprised that he felt I was too personal. I find my writing to be deliberately vague, a lot of the time, and I’ve grown extremely cryptic by nature in some ways–especially in my poetry.

I’ve honed my writing skills, I’d like to think, for intimate reading. It is very much from my viewpoint, with reference to my life and in my voice. In terms of writing private stuff in public, I started to cut back in 2004, when social networking got really big a la MySpace. But it wasn’t enough. I joined another networking site, thinking nobody would read my stuff again. Hi5, 2005. But it happened again. I deleted my account, determined not to blog and grossed out by writing for the public. Facebook became my experiment with non-personal writing. I wonder if it worked…

It was on Facebook that I found my readership really blowing up. I go through extreme social butterfly phases, and these amount to a lot of Facebook adds. I have averaged my FB “friend” deletes at about 15 a month over the past 3yrs (not 30, nor 200 as I did on a couple of big hits). I would have more than 1200 FB friends right now if I accepted every add and didn’t delete. But I get really claustrophobic. The point is, a lot of these adds are from people I’ve only just “met” or had one conversation with. Some have met me at parties, others at dinners or arts and political events. I had a surge in my last year of university, when I was most active in extra curricular activities.

The point is, there came a point where I was writing notes on my Facebook and people were reading them. I tried not to be personal, but apparently they bordered on personal–one guy I was dating accused me of putting my diary online- We didn’t date very long after that:) Others, however, started sending me private messages and commenting on my notes. Some told me they came on Facebook just to read my notes. People I’d met once, twice, were asking me to meet up and making references to my notes. It was an interesting phenomenon. It was scary, to be honest, and I purposely avoided these people–only because I felt they probably built me up to be more than I was. This was sometimes true, but I like to think some people stick around because I’m a nice person and not just a nice writer. I did have a stalker, yes, but I won’t talk about that here as it was already discussed. I found writing on Facebook too personal because these people could see my pictures, see my friends and see my conversations with them and then make their own deductions as to who I am from my blog. I changed a lot of the privacy settings on my profile. People expected me to be exactly like my blog, all the time. I went to a nightclub once, and a guy I knew loosely who was a friend of a good friend, and on my FB list, approached me to chat. I couldn’t do it. Not at a club. I’m not “on” all the time, and if I was in the throes of poetry, I would not want to talk to anyone about it.

The only thing I can admit is extremely personal is my poetry and freeform writing. And I want to share that more than anything. My anecdotal writing is important to me, as part of my career and work. As I said on CJAD, it’s a space for people to relate–to both poetry and storytelling. Not to mention, it’s a means of expressing my creativity. I write a lot, and sometimes feel the need to share to make sure it’s not lost in the dredges of my cell phone or notepads. I believe this is the same approach taken by other creative writers, artists, musicians and actors.

One experiences a rising, choked sensation paramount to heartburn when creativity is stifled without an outlet. Perhaps my initial entrance into blogging and writing online for the public was a child-like cry for attention, but I’ve grown to direct my creativity towards sharing my writing as more polished works that may or may not strike the interest of the public for their own reasons.

On a side note, and to close, let me just tell you that while looking through my old Tripod site tonight, I decided to Google all my net friends from when I was in gr.8. They all pretty much disappeared with the deterioration of WBS.net, a forum we all used to frequent. One guy, who was actually my “net boyfriend” (please don’t ask, it was this weird thing everyone did on this site) for a few day…well, I just looked him up and realized he is about 8yrs older than me. So, when I was 13 and about to start gr.9, he was in his 3rd year of university. He graduated highschool 3yrs before I started highschool. I found his LinkedIn and shit. He’s wearing a pair of knee-length shorts, a dress shirt and suspenders in his Wiki page.