Diabetes Blog Week 2012
Scott Benner
It's that time of year again... Diabetes Blog Week is upon us. Each day of blog week diabetes bloggers all around the world sit down and write from a prompt found at 'Bitter Sweet'.
Diabetes Blog Week, Day 2, "Find a Friend"
Today's topic is:
It seems the most popular thing about Diabetes Blog Week is that it helps us find blogs we weren’t reading yet and connect with some new blog friends. With that in mind, let’s kick off Diabetes Blog Week by making some new connections. Think about the d-blogs you read that you think we may not know about and introduce us to one that you love!! Let’s all find a new friend today!
Today's prompt makes me think about how sharing on the internet was once thought of. At one time no one gave their real name online, opting to go by a nom de plume for secrets sake. If you've been online for any measure of time you have undoubtedly corresponded with Boba Fett's Uncle_987642 or partygirl_5678930987 at least once.
Today it seems like everyone is online and between FaceBook and blogs like this one it can feel like they all share everything about themselves. In the circles I exist in through my computer knowing full names and the places where people that you've never met in person live is common. Folks list their phone numbers on FaceBook and give out their email addresses like they were balloons at a fair. It all seems so normal now to most.
but not everyone...
People like me who share some of the more personal moments in their lives can lose sight of the fact that not everyone is as comfortable as we are doing so. In my mind the DOC is made up of the blogs, PodCasts and web sites that I'm aware of. That's the physical place that I imagine in my head. It's populated by the people that run, write and talk about diabetes in this digital world but it's life force is all of the people that read and follow. I certainly can't be aware of each and every blog and there is no true way for me to quantify the real number of people that read and benefit from them but I imagine that number to be large but not nearly as large as it could or perhaps should be.
As a group we are all very comfortable with computers and smart phones and it's no issue for those of us that share to be transparent in front of the world wide web. However, there is a larger number of us that can't or don't want to say hello. Those people are being well served by reading what the rest put into the world and that's not just okay, it's fabulous!
I'm never going to meet most of you and I'm quite sure that a great many of you that read this will never take any sort of physical form in front of me whether that means an avatar or a handshake. So to all of you that will forever look like a tick mark on the counter that measures how many people visit Arden's Day I say, "hello friend even though we don't talk, I'm comforted that you are there".
**If you've gotten this far you are likely wondering why I didn't seem to write to the prompt. The short answer is that I don't do well in that situation... I don't write well to prompts but I do love Diabetes Blog Week! Stop back tomorrow to see how I'll loosely connect Tuesday's topic to something I want to say...
You are but a click away from reading my Day 2 post from Diabetes Blog Week 2012...