Gary Walter asks about self censorship — do we trade off authenticity for safety?
I gave my opinion in his comments, but because it ended up being so long, I’m reposting here (with minor modifications):
Gary, we all self-censor. People ask us for an opinion about clothing or hair style and want affirmation. They don’t want to hear that it makes them look fat or old. So we don’t tell them. We say it makes them great or young or vibrant or whatever. We’re protecting their feelings and letting them know they’re loved.
Other times we self-censor because we don’t want to admit that we’re not perfect, that we’re still figuring things out, or that we hold opinions or do things that others might consider unacceptable. This self-censorship is not about protecting others, it’s about protecting ourselves. It’s more insidious because we still justify that we’re protecting others from the conflict that might occur. But we’re just fooling ourselves.
Does that make it wrong to self-censor? I don’t think so. I don’t have to bare every thought or impulse or action just because I have a blog and a twitter account. Part of this journey we call life is learning how and when to disclose to others, who we can and should trust.
I’m not “authentic” enough to tweet that my wife and I had a fight on the way to church and then paste on smiles to shake hands and say “fine” when asked how I am. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with church. We need to be more open and honest about our true condition. Yet it’s hard. Those who volunteer at church, even playing the piano, are expected to meet certain standards (at least in some eyes) and is authenticity really the battle we want to fight? I’m not there yet and may never be. I rationalize that this problem is as much with the church as with myself, but am only half convinced.
With social networking, authenticity is even more difficult, or maybe it’s easier. Most of us have never met you, yet feel like we know you from your blog posts and tweets. We come to this relationship with no expectations other than that you entertain us or make us think once in a while. It’s working.
It’s when the “in real life” and “virtual” lives cross paths that difficulties arise. Those in real life don’t understand how or why we bare our lives online. It rocks their paradigm in ways they don’t understand. How dare you admit that or hang out with those people or do that?
It’s a personal decision. What do you get from online sharing? Is it a self-discovery process that could just as well be done with a private diary? Is it an ego trip where you fool yourself into thinking that the world is interested when you get your drink and piece of free fruit from the cafeteria? Or is it a way of making friends in a new world and you’d no more censor yourself with us than you would with your friends in real life? After all, why would we be authentic with you if you’re not willing to do so with us?
Maybe the real question is why would you be willing to share something online that you wouldn’t share in person?
Questions only you can answer. Good luck! And I’m looking forward to reading your answers online. 
What do you think? What are you not willing to share online and why not?
Update. Check out the comments on Gary’s post. Gary responds to my comment and at least a couple others.
Update 2. Gary promotes his comment response to a new post and embeds an interview with on StrangeLove covering the topic.
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Starting a Blog — Choosing a WordPress Theme
A WordPress blog is easily customized with themes. A theme affects more than the appearance or style of the blog; it also defines what information is displayed and where. In fact, once you choose a theme, you can change its appearance by editing its CSS files or using a child theme.
I chose the K2 theme for Impolite Company and blogan.net for the following reasons:
K2 Sidebar Manager lets you control where on your blog each widget appears: the main page, individual pages, single post pages, the archives page, or even individual posts. I use K2 Sidebar Manager’s display feature to restrict my lengthy blogrolls and Google Reader shared items to the long main page.
Note: WordPress is planning to add most of K2 Sidebar Manager’s functionality. Once that happens, all themes will be able to take advantage limiting where widgets appear.
My custom CSS file changes my colors, background images, fonts, link styles, and supports some plugins. I also use it to unclutter my blog by hiding some extraneous icons and messages I don’t want to display.
K2 comes with two sample custom CSS files to get you started.
K2 has some other features that I’m not currently using, but you might find useful.
Asides are useful for short posts. For now, I use Twitter as a “microblog” and import the “tweets” into my sidebar using Twitter Tools. Josh Bancroft uses Twitter Tools to save his tweets as asides in his WordPress database and have them displayed in a sidebar.
What theme did you choose and why?
Next up, content plugins.
Update 10/1/08. The latest K2 nightly build now supports threaded comments, but no longer supports AJAX commenting.