Public vs Private Writing in the Age of Digital

In this essay, I will present the four key motives of why people write, as described by George Orwell in Why I Write (1946) and reflect on how I have altered my writing regarding publishing content online privately and in public over the years. In this reflective essay, I explore my own experiences of writing online over the last decade, compared with the views in George Orwell's short text.

All motives described by Orwell in his essay Why I Write (1946), including sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose, do alter how I write and the types of content I publish online publicly and in private via my blogs and the importance of authorship and voice when doing so.

Like Orwell, I, too, felt isolated and undervalued, growing up creating a private world of my own. Writing in my journal was the safe space that helped me navigate those uncertain years, which I have maintained since age thirteen. Orwell’s candid and personal reflections and insights of his childhood and why he writes were the catalyst and inspiration for choosing the question, how has an author's sense of the division between public and private writing been altered by the increasing amount and types of content published online?

What Orwell believes are the four great motives for writing, sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose, do alter how I write, and I will further explore reasons why I agree with Orwell’s insights. Particularly navigating between public and private writing across various online platforms and social media networks, I constantly alter my professional ambitions and personal reflections. It was a natural fit for me to explore further in this essay.

Initially, I disagreed when I first read Orwell's (1946) take on the first motive he shared, sheer egoism. Orwell described that sheer egoism is a primary motive for writing. It wasn’t until I read it for the second and third time that I appreciated his statement's truth. Orwell (1946) says that sheer egoism is a “desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, is our sheer ego at play”.

I reflected on the platforms I share most of my writing, including my blog, Podcast, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Instagram and Facebook and the content, my authorship, and my voice changes. Genuinely and respectfully honouring the platform and my audiences, sometimes, especially when it relates to my online business matters, it is my ‘sheer egoism’ inspired content that I permit myself to share of work I deliver. Considering these reflections, all my written work has an element of sheer egoism because it is carefully considered. The desire to be cleverly talked about and remembered after death is part of the process when I curate and publish. Albeit I do not recognise myself as an egoistic person, it wasn’t until I discovered this work from Orwell that I recognised the efforts I go to position myself as a leading authority, creating value and presenting myself in the best possible light.

Continuing with Orwell (1946) and his second great motive for writing, I agree with the motive of aesthetic enthusiasm. Especially today, when written content can be presented, re-purposed and enhanced in so many ways from when Orwell wrote his text. Now we can include video, audio, and images and connect various other online publications and other authors; that aesthetic enthusiasm is a motive I share both on and offline.

For example, when I self-published my first book, Adventures of a Ballooning Girl, Karatzias (2014), I invested heavily in the aesthetic presentation of my first publishing experience. To produce a book that was just as aesthetically pleasing to look at as it was to read, I hired a professional photographer and illustrator for each chapter made all the difference to the book's sentiment, where physical copies were sold across seventy-five independent bookstores around the country with e-books made available via Amazon.

Orwell's (1946) third great motive to write is a historical impulse and desire to ‘see things as they are, to find out facts and store them up for the use of prosperity’. For me, historical impulse closely ties to delving deeper. Investigating further and telling stories that need to be told. In addition, I consider historical impulse as a means to honour the future by acting, developing and documenting resources today that we can look back on tomorrow. It was my historical impulse to launch my book Adventures of a Ballooning Girl, Karatzias (2014) that motivated me to decide to honour my ten-year journey in hot air ballooning with a book documenting my adventures. It is also why I believe we should all take a leaf out of Orwell's book and keep writing.

Orwell's (1946) final great motivation for writing is political purpose. I enjoyed reading Orwell's context of using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Orwell (1946) shared that no book is free from political bias, and the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is a ‘political attitude’. In my writing journey, having a purpose-led objective has always enhanced any piece of writing, not to mention providing a better experience for the reader.

For all four motivations to write, there was a moment in Orwell's (1946) reflections I disagreed with. Orwell (1946) shared a blanket statement that all writers are ‘vain, selfish and lazy and at the very bottom of their motives, there lies a mystery. Albeit amateur, as a writer, I do not relate as someone vain, selfish, or lazy, yet I appreciate the perspective of Orwell’s sentiment complemented by a well-articulated stance on the conundrum and pain of writing a book:

One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist of understanding. For all one knows that demon is the same instinct that makes a baby squeal for attention.

Everything we publish on the web says a lot about who we are and what we care about. Authorship, for example, is a term that can be used to describe the relationship between an author and their work. It can refer to the person who created something or how they did it.

Similarly, in a study of online identities, according to Bullingham and Vasconcelos (2013), contrary to engaging with the process of whole persona adoption, the key finding was that participants were keen to re-create their offline self-online but engaged only in editing facets of self.

Whether it be the photograph we choose to represent us on a social networking site, the biography we include as a part of our blog, or the nature of our conversations with others through comment culture and message boards, the more we contribute online, the more we are establishing for ourselves with an online persona in the public arena.

While the internet has always been where people can express themselves, it is increasingly becoming a place where we are also expected to do so. Over the last few years, this has resulted in a new phenomenon that has come to be known as personal branding. Bullingham and Vasconcelos (2013) argue that the distance between the performer and audience creates detachment and makes it easy to conceal aspects of the offline self and embellish the online. My journey in my profession has consisted of toeing the line between writing personally and publicly online over various platforms via blogs and social media, on my business blog and sometimes getting paid to write for others. My professional and personal handles give full public access and can be seen as an act of sheer egoism, as stated earlier by Orwell and the motives to write in his essay Why I Write (1946).

When it comes to authorship, for me, the primary objective is to exercise thought and industry leadership that is aligned with my personal and professional goals, values, and voice online. Authority also comes into play here when we consider different sources: education, experience; expertise; reputation; recognition; position/title; and even popularity and popularity rankings (such as the number of Twitter or Instagram followers).

By displaying authority and sharing my voice through my private and public blogs, and online assets, for example, I can help build trust between myself and my readers because they are either learning or being entertained through my work. Liu (2014) examines the voice of personal blogs by analysing written texts. Doing so, reveals that the voice of personal blogging is also influenced by other resources, such as images embedded to evoke emotional and aesthetic meanings, as outlined by Orwell (1946).

Every day we are exposed to a vast, ever-changing landscape of people writing about their lives, business interests and opinions. It is important to note that even if we choose to write privately when we write on the Internet, we are writing in a highly public environment open to anyone who wishes to read what we have written and respond. For this reason, we need to consider how online writing is influenced by the platform on which it is to be published and by the narrative mode/genre of the piece.

Problematically, however, in the context of the Internet, it quickly becomes apparent that any clear distinctions between personal and public writing are blurred. As we have seen, anything we write on the Web is effectively public. Given this, we need to consider how personal narratives and disclosure affect readers and work towards creating an online identity by retaining ‘your voice’, especially when spreading your work across multiple platforms.

McCullagh (2008) further explores blogging to offer individuals a unique opportunity to work on their self-identity via the degree of self-expression consciously bringing the ‘private’ to the public realm, despite the inherent privacy risks they face in doing so and worth exploring when it comes to sharing personal information online.

As we have discovered, the Internet is a unique publishing platform. It allows anyone to become an author, have a voice and write whatever they want about their choice. However, this freedom can also lead to problems if you do not consider how you will write in the first place. There are many ways to approach this issue, but they all have one thing in common: they involve writing within the constraints of different publishing formats on the Internet.

Blogs described by Baxter and Connolly (2013) as websites that are created by individuals to display historical as well as up-to-date content is one of the most popular formats of online publishing. Although a blog is generally associated with the dissemination of content there are things to consider when writing and publishing a blog post. There is the constraint of length. In my experience blog posts need to be short enough that people can read them within minutes without getting bored or distracted by other tasks.

The second constraint is style. Because most blogs are run by individuals rather than companies or organisations, there is no standard way of writing them and no set rules about what should be included or excluded from each post (although some blogs tend towards a particular style). However, to ensure a successful blog, keep things simple; and see Orwell's (1945) Rules for Writers as it is just as relevant for blogging as it is for any form of writing (or at least until you change themes or make major changes):

i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

iv. Never use the passive when you can use the active.

v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

The final constraint is consistency and having the will, purpose, and drive to honour our writing commitments, whether in public or in private, to write well and write often.

In this essay, I have addressed how an author's sense of the division between public and private writing has been altered by the increasing amount and types of online content published in relation to my experience of writing in the unit and beyond over the years.

My exploration of the topic has been centred around the motives described by Orwell in his essay Why I Write (1946), including sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose, which do alter how I write and the types of content I publish online publicly and in private via my blogs and the importance of authorship and voice when doing so. Despite Orwell’s (1946) book being published seventy-six years ago, the motives and shared experiences on why he writes and believes everybody else does, too, has been an exploration into why I write and who I write for when it comes to the division of my public and private writing, my authorship and using blogging to find my voice.

REFERENCES:

Orwell, G. (1946). Why I write. Penguin Books. https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/

Karatzias, D. (2014). Adventures of a Balloon Girl. Busy Bird Publishing.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Adventures-Balloon-Girl-business-potential-ebook/dp/B00KAI845K

Bullingham, L., & Vasconcelos, A. (2013). The presentation of self in the online world': Goffman and the study of online identities. White Rose Research Online. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/77277/5/WRRO_77277.pdf

Liu, J. (2014). Mediating the voice of personal blogging: An analysis of Chinese a-list personal blogs. OBS Observatorio, 8(1).

McCullagh, K. (2008). Blogging: self-presentation and privacy. https://doi.org/10.1080/13600830801886984

Baxter, G. J., & Connolly, T. M. (2013). The "state of art" of organisational blogging. The Learning Organization, 20(2), 104-117. doi:https://doi.org/10.1108/09696471311303755