A new charge in blogging; will fear creep in?

One hint of a new angle of blog-fearing:

Consider the erotic potential between blogger and commenters.

The rest of the article has nothing to do with fear, besides the little tensions generated by a love story.  But that first thought is a fascinating one for all sorts of reasons... the one we can zero in on, here, being eroticizing this piece of blogging.

Cyberfear has often dwelled on sexuality, as my research has shown for more than a decade.  Inappropriate sexuality, locally transgressive sex, representations of sex charged with influencing offline behavior, the works.

Anxieties about online life have also often focused on social networks.  How and when we interact badly with each other, what online abuse is, the notion that the internet simply reflects online behavior, the other notion that cyberculture magnifies our worst instincts: blog posting and commenting is a part of that, one which has grown with the blogosphere's near-decade of expansion.

So it's possible, I hypothesize, that we could see scary stories appear which work this poster-commentator angle.  Consider the psychology of posting.  We bloggers hurl posts into the social world, immediately triggering an expectation dynamic, which may or may not be satisfied.  We are accustomed, perhaps, to negative replies: criticism, corrections, abuse, and the delights of spam.  At the same time we (some of us) thrill to the feedback, relishing the thoughts, creativity, support, and criticism we receive.  There's a lot of room for delight and fear.

And, of course, face-to-face relationships.  Gawker twits the Times article nicely on this score.

We can find early examples of this sort of things. For instance, Mister Welldone writes disturbing posts, which call out fearful responses from readers.  And he did offer a disturbing reply to one of my posts, a little over one year ago.

The article offers one nice, small example as well:

After he offered his Social Security number, in case she wanted to run a criminal check...

So keep an eye out for blog post-comment scary stories.  While the New York Times sees Austen in that dynamic, we might also spot some Radcliffe or Lewis.

(Notice, too, the Web 2.0 storytelling angle.  Even the New York Times gets it!

The tale of Meade and Ms. Althouse is a cross between the studiedness of a Victorian epistolary courtship —a modern-day Robert Browning googling his dear Elizabeth Barrett — and the wackiness of 21st-century life online.)

Comments

[Online pharmacy]

Cyberfear has often dwelled on sexuality, as my research has shown for more than a decade.

[writing tips]

Cyberfear has often dwelled on sexuality, as my research has shown for more than a decade.