They're my books, and my bookmarks.
Four and a half years ago I asked whether we'd feel comfortable showing our bookmarks to someone else. And that wasn't the first time. I remember asking this question in the first online community with which I was involved over seven years ago (though I have to admit that nobody seemed particularly concerned about the "problem" I was raising). Although I asked that question, over the years I've been quite open about my bookmarks, never, to the best of my knowledge, trying to hide them from anyone, and even making parts of them publicly available. Yet I continued to feel that there was something highly personal about them.
A few months ago, following a crash of a friend's computer, I received a call for help, the gist of which went: I've lost all my bookmarks and feel lost in cyberspace. Can you send me some of yours, just to get me on my feet? I was happy to oblige and set out to browse through my files and find something to send her. But in each folder I reviewed I continually found myself asking "would this have any meaning for her?", or telling myself "nobody would have any reason to look at that page". In many cases the individual pages might actually have been of interest, but only when taken as a whole did they take on any real meaning, and that meaning would be comprehensible only to myself.
Though I'm not a terribly public person, I've never felt that I've had anything to hide, nor have I tried to do so. And of course writing these columns is in itself an act of exposing myself. But that exposure still takes place via filters - I decide what to expose, and how to do so. Bookmarks are different. They're the raw materials that ordinarily will be worked into a finished product. They're me before the filters go to work, and that makes me very public. In the end, I apologized and explained that I had nothing to send her.
Go to: Well, at least on my shelves, or
Go to: Bye-bye Bookmarks