Balance

They say you should always know your audience. I realize that this website has an audience much larger than my small group of friends. I know that students I have taught or worked with in some form or another read this site. I know my co-workers visit once in a while. I know that some day, maybe a potential employer will decide to check my references and might find this website. For those reasons, I do not write about everything I think about. In fact, you could say that I almost censor myself very slightly. When people respond publicly to what I write, unfortunately sometimes they don’t realize they can easily make themselves look unintelligent, and bring me down in the process.

When I ran a dial-up bulletin board system in high school, it was similar. Everything everyone posted was a reflection on both their own person and myself. I did a pretty good job of maintaining the level of maturity — in fact the “regulars” liked my system since it was free of all the pettiness and immaturity of the other BBS’s around.

These days, there is even less of a separation between the “online” world and the “real” world. Web sites are more public than dial-up BBS’s. You don’t have to be “a member” to read the messages. We don’t use “handles;” for the most part everyone knows us by our real names. I like having fun, just I don’t want to deal with immature comments. It reflects poorly on everyone. Many readers won’t know what I’m talking about, since I have deleted the offending post and the associated comments. I could have just deleted the offending comments from the posts and pretend they were never there, but I really wanted to say this. Thanks for reading.

By the way, I saw the movie 15 Minutes earlier tonight with Becca. It was the first time I’d been to a movie theater in a long time. It had a lot to say about media, especially television. We all know the message already though.