I don’t quite know how the feel about the recent (read: 2-month old) debacle between Xiaxue and SarongPartyGirl involving M’sia’s very own Kennysia.

For posterity, I’ll link a.. blog with an alternative view on the affair, here, with all the sordid details for all to see.

I gather all this happened during the Bloggers.SG meet-up some time back. At the time, I was still trolling the vastness of the blog-verse, discovering new tidbits and a thriving blog-community in M’sia.

What can I say? As someone not even remotely involved in the whole affair, and therefore an observer only, I can say that the internal bitching brought on by the intrusion of real-life into the blog-verse has borne bad fruit; one of the reasons I have always eschewed meet ups and revelations of real life identities. I bet by now there’s just so little trust now left amongst certain bloggers down south.

Unfortunate.

It just speaks that much more emphatically about the fragility of your online personas. Back when, let’s see…about 5 or 6 years ago when I was blogging over at Diaryland (before the word “blog” had any currency), things were much simpler. Everyone knew the limits of their space on the internet, and best of all, appreciated these limits. Anonymity, whether some agree or not, is a precious gift, an advantage for those who’d misuse it, perhaps, but it cuts both ways.

Blogs these days are just too exposed; what began as an internet sub-culture has now become a full-blown fad. I stand by my previous comments on “preferences” and yet at the same time wonder if what has started off as an avenue to air thoughts has transformed into a vehicle for blaring them out.

See, the thing is, there has always been a plethora of blogs that some would call “infantile” and just as many blogs that purport to be serious. You could check out blogs on Pitas and Diaryland and you’ll see the diversity; heck, even if you go back to the years of Blogger’s inception, you’d see the same thing.

What worries me is the strident call, in Singapore, for bloggers to be serious. It seems people who are now begining to understand the pervasive nature of blogs are expecting said blogs to, at least, appear to take themselves seriously. Whatever happened to writing anything you wanted?

When I finally quit Diaryland, it was because I enjoyed writing in my own offline journal, with pen on paper, and I couldn’t at the time be arsed about taking time out to post something on my diaryland diary… and also because I had compromised my anonymity with real-life excursions. I lost the power to say what I want, when I wanted to and how I wanted to; I began practicing self-censorship, wondering what others would think of the real me if I suddenly reveal tidbits like, for example, enjoying deep throats (heh… ;) ).

I had become too exposed, I think, and the same thing is happening in Singapore I feel; now that bloggers have been unmasked as real people, standards of acceptability are now being applied to these bloggers — there has been a mental shift from regarding bloggers as anonymous netizens to full blown individuals with real points of reference.

It’s pretty sad, I think… I hope this doesn’t happen here in the Malaysian blog scene.

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p/s: I’m feeling frivolous this morning. Sad, too. Hence the change in my blog’s tag/name. Ha!