In Kline and Burnstein’s Blog! an interview with Ayelet Waldman told of how Waldman went from a novelist stay-at-home mom to a blog fanatic. She was sucked into the blogosphere and brought as far as to write a suicide note online because of fellow bloggers comments to stories about her before other bloggers, friends and her husband helped her out.
The severity of her story is no laughing matter, however the fact remains that Waldman was on medication for bipolar disorder. She had a new medication that made her feel suicidal so the severity of posting blogs online is not so much the problem as posting them while on faulty medication. This isn’t to say that blogs are completely harmless. In her interview Waldman commented on how she kept up contact with 400 other pregnant women across the country while she was pregnant. She shared thoughts and questions with these women whom she had never met face to face. Looking back she saw how foolhardy this was. I agree with her views now, but would not completely boycott blogs, simply reduce the time spent on them to perhaps a couple times per week. As a writer, Waldman wanted to use her thoughts to write books or simply to keep her ideas more private. She realized that spilling her heart out to thousands of bloggers she didn’t know was not what she wanted to do ever again. I applaud her for discovering this.