The danger of blogging...

This post shall be one of the most serious of all. The reason why I'm writing this is because just a moment ago, I visited my friend's blog. The only thing was, it wasn't a blog anymore. There was just an essay called "An Explanation" against a white background and nothing else.

I read this essay and realised the severity of blogging itself. All along, even before I started to create my own blog, I knew blogging was fun but also very dangerous. That's why I hesitated to write any more posts during that period when I first created a blog as part of an English lesson in secondary school and then making my comeback to blogger.com after more than a year. Let me explain to you why blogging can be such a dangerous thing...

Firstly, I find blogging a little silly because if you call your blog your online diary, isn't a diary supposed to be kept private? Why would you want the whole world to know about your life - especially your private life? But then again this isn't fully true. Some people create blogs not to talk about their lives but to talk about the things they like, etc. That's somewhat like me, too.

Secondly, blogging is about posting your opinions of anything under the sun - from people to things. Yes, I know it's a free world, and you are allowed to speak your mind. But when you start to post negative opinions of people and things, and especially if it's a controversial matter, the probability of you having more problems is very high. You'll start to be rebutted in your opinion, and if it's a really serious matter, you might just be in the hands of the law. This recently happened in Singapore, when two young men were being discriminative to Muslims here. If I still remember correctly, they posted their negative opinions of them and even bad jokes about them on their blogs. The two men were brought to the law and charged from there...

The same applies when you happen to post negative opinions of your friends and even family - sometimes even unintentionally. Although it's within your circle and not the law, you can imagine what's going to happen when the people you talk bad about find out about your blog and what you've said about them. Isn't this going to cause more problems and misunderstandings in your relationships with them? If you look back in the past, when blogs didn't exist, and people kept their negative opinions to themselves, there was a hell lot more peace between people, that's for sure.

My point is not that you cannot blog, but blog carefully. Especially when it comes to controversial issues and your relationships with people. Think twice before you type it out, and put yourself in the other person's shoes. Is he or she going to like what I'm going to say about him or her? Will it spoil our relationship? Will this get me into trouble with the law? Make sure you know that what you're typing is not only legal, but in a tone of healthy debate or courtious disagreement. Who wants to get angry, huh? In human nature we all want to feel pleased about ourselves as well as the things around us. So try to create as much peace as possible in the world...

This happened to my friend, who unintentionally did something on his blog that hurt another person. Even if he didn't mean to do that - he confessed that it was unintentional - you can imagine the seriousness of this in terms of his wounded relationship with the person he accidentally offended. Now that he knew what had happened, he wrote a letter explaning his view on the matter, apologized, and said that blogging was over for him. No more. This is the danger of blogging - or should I say, the danger of our own minds in what we put into our blogs. In most cases, we are our own worst enemy...