The hobgoblin of little minds

I have lately been embroiled in a debate about whether there is a time-frame within which it is permissable for bloggers to make substantive changes to their posts or indeed, whether they should always explain (and make visible) any corrections they might make after first clicking on publish.

Clearly the guidelines for those that blog in the name of a brand need to be more prescriptive, but for personal blogs I see no reason to impose any restrictions, especially as it is the very nature of the electronic media to foster the kind of textually non-definitive pronoucements that book-haters like Socrates would surely have approved of.

Franco-Czech author Milan Kundera's views are pretty clear on this:

"What an author creates doesn't belong to his papa, his mama, his
nation, or to mankind; it belongs to no one but himself; he can publish it when he wants and if he wants; he can change it, revise it, lengthen it, shorten it, throw it in the toilet and flush it down without the slightest obligation to explain himself to anybody at all."

(The context of this remark was an anecdote about how Stravinski fell out with his conductor friend Ernest Ansermet over edits made by Stravinski himself (and later by Ansermet) to a couple of the composer's pieces.)

Kundera also makes the point that it is much easier to laugh off an earlier romantic attachment to some awful person than an attachment to say Nazism or some other awful political system. People will chuckle with you when you say "how could I have fallen in love with such a ridiculous person?" but not when you say "how could I have fallen in love with such a ridiculous mass-murderer?" Tintin's creator Hergé spent most of his latter years trying to live down his flirtation with fascism in the 30s.

Voters can change their political allegiances every time an election comes round, but party activists are expected to be more persistent with their dogmas. Oddly enough, ideology is something we are supposed to be comparatively consistent about. And even when we are not, we are duly suspected of it. I'm with Huxley on this one: "Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead."

Some people use blogs to broadcast their certainties. Others, myself included, use them to muse about the problematic stuff. Sometimes, and not always visibly, the act of publishing online fosters an exchange of views and/or a re-formulation of the problem. There's then a time-frame (which for me is several days) when that is more likely to lead to a revision of the original post than the crafting of a new one.

Under most circumstances I no more want the readers of particular versions of my blog posts to witness my corrections than Stravinski would have wanted an orchestra to use a score where all his revisions were printed.

The living dead of consistency and dogma are always going to try to nibble away at your sense of ownership of your own words. The moment that you utter them, they want to archive them so they can be used against you at a future date. And in the information age the freedom to be non-definitive and inconsistent is being paid for with the un-freedom of the electronic footprint.