Monday, December 1, 2008

Takes a Village

As I continue to explore the blogging world for my final paper the phrase it takes a village to raise a child is constantly coming up in my mind. This community is so devoted to each other and they continue to help each other out, with prayers, encouraging thoughts and monetary donations. It truly seems like this group of people have found each other in a desperate need for more parenting support. Where their needs are not met in the real world they turn to the virtual and instantly have a great deal more people to ask for help or vent at. Seems pretty good.
Except, when you use a village to raise a child you have to trust the villagers. Each and every person that you take advice from or ask to help watch you're kid you have to trust. Especially on the internet this can be tough to do. People are cruel and they judge as much as they help. The blogs I looked at censored negative comments and warned in the blog posts themselves to be nice. There was a need to claim that mean comments were not helpful, but the internet is a big scary anonymous place and people are going to be harsh. This harshness seems to spiral into guilt on the part of the parents and I'm not sold on the fact that that's so helpful.
I think that its pretty incredible how many people are willing to share their entire life with others through books and blogs. With this new place to share comes vulnerability and all parents open themselves up for that in their circle of friends and family, but the writers we've looked at open up to their entire audience of strangers or the entire blogging community. A couple of the author's we've read have given disclaimers in their writing about what they are willing to share (Alternadad doesn't offer drug talk advice for example). Yet there is still so much personal information offered out to the world as Bernstein said in order to reach other people. This puts parents in a vulnerable position and they will most certainly run into cruel villagers.
So the question for me is, is it still worth it to have a big vast village of readers. It seems clear that a close knit village is important, but a virtual anonymous one or a vast book audience one seems dangerous and to hold to little privacy. Does this mean that this genre will die out? It looks like that's not going to happen any time soon.

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