What Wilkinson has to say about the self is provocative and largely true, I think. The self is a convergence of loyalties and enthusiasms and beliefs and habits. That there is a “stable” self, which persists through the flux of illness and health and better and worse, is an “illusion.” Wilkinson’s best line is that the “self is more like a URL,” an “address in a web of obligation and social expectation.”Mr. Wilkinson will think differently when he discovers that he is old and that there is more of a stable self behind the loyalties, enthusiasms, etc. than he thinks. It is where those others come from.
The minute a blogger joins the staff of a magazine, though, everything changes. … When the blogger becomes a “channel” for a media organization (to use Wilkinson’s term for it), he must adhere to more than the house style. He must also trim his judgment to suit the editorial fashions of his employer.
This blog started as a newspaper blog. And the editorial connection never interfered with it, probably because the powers that were at the paper paid little attention to it. I am, however, in the process of rethinking it in order to take advantage of what I think is its form.
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