Imagine Unlimited

If you are to write across two cultures and two continents, being Kenyan in the US, using material in your real life can be fearfully difficult to accomplish.

With the stringent libel and personal rights in this nation in which I and others are student visitors, one is loathe to imagine how to blog, and still maintain a private life. Just today, I spoke with a close friend who ended the conversation, a rather candid chat about our lives with the rejoinder, " And so...can I NOT see that in your blog" 

Admittedly, I love to share what I see in the world around me with people who read whatever blog entries I put out, but I never thought that people may perceive my blogging as a threat. In truth, there is very little way that I can avoid being traced. It is now very easy to get tagged as a threat if you mention certain key phrases and words in your writings, and put them online. And hardly a day passes without you hearing of a blogger arrested for writing in some part of the world. That kind of high level censorship is not the only one I am referring to when think of fear and blogging.

I am talking about the fine line between African traditional privacy regarding one's life and goings on, and the tell-all-to-everyone kind of life that blogging encourages. In the present, if I blog as a African, I must remember that the use of my name implies my family. Names are a great identifier in my community and in the society back home where I grew up. Here, many friends born and raised in the US have their whole lives on 'blast' telling all about everything including their families etc, in a way that many of my Kenyan and African friends are not. As far as I am from home, thanks to these friendly interwebs, anything you put on your Facebook and MySpace is available to every person including the kids from the neighborhood jobless corner wherever you grew up.

Fear and blogging also navigates very closely one's professional social and networking contacts, making every card exchange where you try and make career connections a potential landmine, especially since one cannot blog. Where does that leave me when discussing job opportunites, or even the field that I am in with the web community who can offer much needed advice? And yet, the cutting edge of resume sharing is the online personal website, which you share with your employer where you went to school, what you studied and where you worked all through. How many people have you met who are ready to put themselves out there in that manner. I call them the "Fearless" particularly when they add personal diary commentary such as this, also known as a weblog.

Blogging also inspires my own fear. Well, if you consider the stories portrayed in "To Catch a Predator" which highlights the web pedophiles who are caught while lurking on the internet. Or all the movies that now portray people who share their location online and get stalked, while in their daily lives. No, sadly, online, no Spider Squad will be called to trap potential attackers. Add a general societal suspicion of sharing information, you have a blogger who continues to walk the fine line between fear and blogging in 2008.