Distance

Isn't it easy to sit at your computer, and read a blog. Or two. Or perhaps one hundred. Maybe even several hundred. That's how many are on my Google Reader. Many of us write down their lives on their blogs. Whether publicly or to a select few, we impart those bits of our lives to the world that we choose to disclose. Many a time, it is particularly at the darker moments of life that we write. And blogging being what it is, we appreciate comments left by friends, acquaintances or distant readers.

However.

How can you place yourself in the shoes of the writer. What makes you think you are selecting the right words and turn of phrase to suit the occasion. Well, it is fairly straightforward when you talk about a death in someone's circle. It is also fairly clear when a blogger says they have had a diagnosis of serious illness - or someone very near and dear has. You can't go far wrong there, can you? No, not really.

Where it can go very badly wrong is in situations where someone is discussing the challenges they face in life. Money may be tight. Relationships that are strained. Past events that are haunting them. Guilt, remorse.

Call me naive, but I'd think that in our blogging community, we are there to support each other. Seems there are exceptions to that rule. I can't believe that there are actually people who see fit to criticise the way someone has dealt with a situation in their life - to come to the point of this post (once more) - which they have described in a blog. How can you, exclusively through this medium, gauge what was right and wrong? I mean, how can you if you weren't there. And even if it was patently incorrect, what right does anyone have to criticise? Nobody.

Nobody whose blog I read fits the above bill. It applies to nobody that comments in this blog either. I am merely highlighting the shadowside of blogging, which sometimes peeps above the horizon of one or two blogs I come across.