Don’t cross the streams
Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you.
Venkman: What?
Spengler: Don’t cross the streams.
Venkman: Why?
Spengler: It would be bad.
My wife is a writer. A blog that she reads regularly, Scriptuality, has come to an end. It was written by Paul Campbell, a man trying to make it in TV scriptwriting. And now that he has, he fears blogging about his experiences in the industry would be harmful to his career: and not blogging at all beats having to self censor.
I found that pretty sad.
But it made me think about my own experience of running a personal blog where I also talk shop – crossing the streams of home and work.
Personally, I find that the act of self-censorship (which anyone crossing those streams must exercise) is all part of it. Writing with a mind to not getting dooced contributes to a fringe benefit of blogging which I was least expecting when I started: that blogging makes you a more reflective person.
Yep. Blogging (as distinct from ‘just typing‘) makes you think. Far from dashing it off, as many people assume is the case, a good blogger writes with an audience in mind. And when that imagined (imaginary?) audience includes bosses present and future, doesn’t that just help bring more rigour and quality to the debate?
Although sometimes there are things you just can’t talk about. At all. Let me give you an example.
I am an active participant in conversations about how government can use digital media to inform and consult people more effectively and how, by doing so, government itself can learn and evolve. I join those conversations here on my blog, via comments on other blogs, and on Twitter – expressing personal views on stuff related to my day job as manager of a government web team. The work/life streams get close, but never cross.
But recently people in my network are also talking about government policies where the use of digital media is a policy outcome, not just a channel for communicating about the policy. Digital mentors and digital inclusion are both led by the department I work for. As such, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be proper for me to get involved in discussions about either of them – in spite of the obvious crossover …even when one of my posts gets a pingback from a blog post explicitly about one of those policies.
Now this is different from the Scriptuality example, because of civil service online propriety and precedent, but the principle is the same: and it doesn’t stop me blogging. Presumably Paul Campbell found that the things he couldn’t say were too many, and too large a part of his blog’s aims, to continue.
Or, like the Ghostbusters boys, he was going to have to cross the streams and thereby create a monster. In this case, not a giant marshmallow man but something worse: a dry, sycophantic blog.
(I am Venkman by the way. In my own mind).
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Hello, I'm Neil Williams. I'm a government web geek, a dad, a husband, a grower of veg, a keeper of hens and a lapsed comedy writer, roughly in that order. 
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