Â§hria's Spot

Virtual Shoji screens

"Shoji screens create an atmosphere of privacy whilst their translucent character allows the soft diffusion of light." -- Handmade Shoji screen website.

The philosophy of the Shoji screen is simple looking, like the screen itself. If it’s closed nothing is happening on the other side. It’s all about courtesy, it’s about respect and it’s about the need to smooth out social situations.

If it's open, communication, air, light and ideas flow freely so it's also about the flow of air and the healthy properties of open spaces and light in a living space. Last but not least, it's about ergonomic flexibility or the idea that one space can have more than one use.

Maybe blogs are a bit like traditional Japanese or Chinese Shoji screened rooms.

When we are going by our pseudonym inside our blogs, the screen is closed but air and light from our ideas slip through the paper walls. Even if we know and see each other in real life, we hesitate to refer to our blogs, testing a bit to see if the screens are open or closed. There is an element of awkwardness in a chance real life meeting of bloggers known to each other primarily through blogging because we don't know if the person we are talking to is walking around with his or her screen open. Maybe we should institute some sort of code word or gesture, like a secret handshake, to use to acknowledge one another without revealing to others that we are bloggers. Okay, this could be fun!

Responses on our blogs are like notes slipped between the Shoji screens or quiet questioning scratches on the wooden frames.

Occasionally someone lights a screen on fire or batters it down to get through and shakes us out of our illusion of privacy. These unwanted intrusions behind the paper walls make me feel a little vulnerable but a little less alone. Sometimes these flaming intrusions form a cyber kick in the pants that is helpful to my continued development and growth. Maybe in real life a person wouldn't be comfortable hefting a verbal boot my way even if I would obviously benefit by it .

Sometimes I slide the screens back all the way and take a walk in the real world with my blog face on. When I introduce myself as Shria I mentally take inventory of everything I've written on my blog and wonder if the person I am speaking to has read it and what he or she thought of it, of me. Times like that I feel the most excitingly vulnerable. I feel tantalizingly real and so much less cyber. I feel almost like I could actually touch the world instead of just watching it from behind a screen.

That's where the idea of multi-use space comes in. My blog is a way to get to know me, or at least the parts of me I let show through the screen. Not only is it my soap box and my self-help manual (constantly under construction), it's a doorway to me.

Blogging can be dangerous. If you think it's bad to throw stones in a glass house, try playing with matches in a paper house. But once you build your house, it's hard to move out of it and it's nice to have company in it some times.

Even though you put bits of yourself out there for judgment through blogging, you learn so much about yourself, other ways of doing things and other people that it's worth the risk of living in a paper house.