Invasion of Privacy?

Well, I was wondering to myself. Is there such a thing called invasion of privacy when it comes to blogs.

This issue about my 'anti-homosexual' post is still simmering after a good week or so and I have come to realise that it was not of my doing. All I did was post up a piece of text that were my own comments in my own personal space for my readers to see. So, I was writing for myself and my minute audience of around 20 hits per day. Most of them regulars. Some I have grown to know over cyberspace, others know me personally and come a-visit because I asked them to.

So it all started when someone linked my post to her blog that had a rather large following. Then my blog became a war zone. (Not that I'm trying to put blame on the person [again])

However, I can't help but feel slightly violated, raped.

I mean, I did not purposely court controversy, I just posted my opinion on my blog, which most of its readers are my friends. And as someone who writes for an audience, I knew my audience from their comments left here. But suddenly, I got gang-raped!

Although I do know that a blog is a public 'for-all-to-see' entity, and as long as you can find my link, you can read me. But somehow, the 'accidental' readers of my blog has made such an impact that until today, I am still gettting stick from guys like 'Bob'... Not that I don't welcome some healthy mind-churning debates, but I would like to point out that I did not start the debate. I merely stated my opinion on a matter.

This could have contributed to the death of my blog if I was really a person suffering from inferiority complex or mental frailty. I know I'm just being anal retentive, but still...

It's not that I'm blaming anyone here and be it far from me that I should do that.

So, this got me thinking... Was my privacy invaded? And when I link someone else's post on my blog, would it invade that person's privacy?

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On a different note, I would also like to address the issue of authorship, like what I commented in the 'still-hot' post...

Well, there are two ways a person can read a text.

Firstly, you can read it as its intended meaning. This will require the author to be present to explain every little detail of his/her text whenever questions arise. This also means that the reader is a 'dead' reader in a sense that he/she is not free to make meaning of the text as and according to his/her own views. And this kind of readership is not really practical since you can't be all asking Dan Brown or JK Rowling what they wanted to say in their novels and what this little detail or that little word is supposed to mean. Try asking JRR Tolkien...

The second way is the 'Death of the Author ~ a'la R. Barthes'. This means that although the author keeps his rights over his published text, the readers are free to make meaning of the text, totally void of what the author's intended meaning for the text was. You can read it with hatred, with anger, with love, or with understanding. Up to you. And I can tell you, as a fellow-writer and reader, most of us subscribe to this theorem. However we would like to argue that 'it is your blog and you can do whatever you want with it', it still doesn't change the fact that the author cannot always be there to explain and take his/her readers through the entire text, word-by-word. And since we also subscribe to, a certain extent, post-modern thinking, we would like to think that we are in control of our own minds and would not like others to teach us how to think.

But blogs have seemingly blurred this line. Now, the author has more control over his/her text in a sense that he/she can choose to either reply/answer questions and justify every little thing about the article, and at the same time, he/she can choose not to do so and let the meaning making process flow accroding to the readers.

But now, the readers are also given that freedom to relate and to add to the meaning making process. Through the comments space, the readers can add thier point of view into the text, thus affecting other readers of the text. This has created a bias in which whoever sees the text first and makes meaning of the text first can skew the argument to his/her meaning made as the first commentor. If I can conjure up a convincing counter-argument to the post, then most of the readers who follow through with the comments can be affected.

So in this sense, when you read the comment boxes, you are reading a product of two or more authors.

hhhmmm....

But this, you must agree with me ~ Meaning making is a very delicate and profound process.