This is especially interesting after Sam asked me about me being worried that people might read my personal thoughts on my blog:
How then can we account for the fact that the screen, which functions metaphorically as a veiling device, actually seems to enable diary writers to violate the codes of opacity instead of locking them into solipsism? The paradox lies in the invisibility seemingly enjoyed on the Internet by both writers and readers. Thanks to the screen, diarists feel they can write about their innermost feelings without fearing identification and humiliation, readers feel they can inconspicuously observe others and derive increased understanding and sometimes power from that knowledge. “Making oneself invisible means one no longer is a mere transparency anyone can see through, but that one has turned into a gaze tha tno taboo can stop” (Starobinski 1971: 302). The screen seems to allow diary-writers and readers both a symoblic re-appropriation of social space and the violation of social codes – a violation whose power derives from the persistence in real life of the taboo broken in a virtual space. Without the prohibition of intimate disclosure, there would be no transgression. The prohibition therefore is constitutive of the meaning of self-revelation on the internet. (13-14)
Serfaty, Viviane. The Mirror and the Veil: An Overview of American Online Diaries and Blogs. Amsterdam Monographs in American Studies, vol. 11. Series eds. Rob Kroes. New York: Rodopi, 2004.
