Think Before I Write

When I first started blogging, I used to write all sorts of nonsense. After all, I thought, nobody reads this blog. On one particular day, I wrote about a mundane visit to a bookshop and decided to spice it up by replacing a real person with a slightly villainous Dickensian character, adding grotesque details for comic effect.

In those days, it wouldn't have occured to me that people could confuse my fiction with the real person.

But today, I received an email from the owner's distraught wife, appalled by my portrayal of her husband. My first reaction was to think, "But I wasn't writing about your husband", then I reread the blog post and realised how naive I had been to think that the fiction was self-evident.

Needless to say, I was mortified and have apologised, along with removing the offending post. This blog is supposed to be mildly entertaining, so the knowledge that I have unwittingly hurt someone is deeply upsetting.

Over the years, I've grown to realise that a simple blog post can make waves. In my case, those waves are the very minor ripples that one would find in the boating pond of a municipal park, but it still calls for a degree of responsibility and self-awareness.

Perhaps I should have listened to Vladimir Putin, who takes blogging far more seriously than me. Today, the Russian parliament have just passed a law, requiring any blogger with more than 3000 hits a day to register with a state regulator. Opponents of Putin, like Gary Kasparov, have been effectively silenced.

I used to think that blogging was just a space to present ideas - an artificial universe that was only tenuously connected to the world we live in. But, today, I have realised that once the words are out there, anything can happen.