Writing

The shame of self-promotion…

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I’ve been blogging for about 5 years now. When I started I really just wanted to write about what was going on in our lives. We had just begun following Jesus and life was ker-ay-zee… So I started writing. It wasn’t my first blog, I’ve loved writing for a while but this one was THE one. Before it had been a bit hit and miss but now, well now I really had something to write about. And because of that it’s been easy. Initially I thought this is part diary for me, to remember all this crazy stuff, but also I wondered if it might help or reach people. So to some extent I didn’t really mind whether people read it or not.

However, I can’t say that I don’t care AT ALL. That would be lying, and therein is the problem with blogging as a Christian (or perhaps as anyone). Because once you do it, people start reading it, then you get some likes or subscribers, then you get comments, and conversations start going and then, well then you start looking at stats. It is, I would suggest, unavoidable. After all if you are writing publicly then you can’t say you don’t care if anyone reads it, because if that was the case you’d keep a diary.

…o0O0o…

That isn’t to say that your motives aren’t honourable. I would count myself in this bracket (how modest of me). I still write for personal pleasure and to record things, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t love it, but I do find myself writing more and more with an audience in mind. Is that ok, I ask myself? I challenge my motives each time I write. Why am I writing this, is it because I want lots of people to ‘like’ the post, or because I want to reach an audience, or is it because it’s something I feel strongly about?

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Pride. That’s what I’m talking about really. Ugh, in Christian circles that’s practically like swearing. We talk about being motivated by pride, by the enemy, are we, dare I say it, ‘self-promoting’?

There was a Twitter conversation last week in which this issue was raised, in which self-promotion was berated as a terrible thing, and some strong opinions were aired. I found myself asking why on earth people felt that strongly about it. In a class last year, one of my tutors shared a quote which suggested that when you criticise someone, it is usually because you are holding a mirror up to yourself – i.e. recognising in them the things you don’t like in yourself. Contraversial maybe and I can’t speak for the people in that Twitter conversation, but it certainly challenged me.

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LikeI try not to ‘self-promote’ as it were. My blog does not bear my name because I want it to be with God as the focus, not me. I tweet because I like tweeting, not just to publicise my writing. But I still share all my posts on Twitter, I still have a Facebook page for my blog, I still get excited when others share my posts or retweet them. Is that wrong? I don’t know, perhaps if we are overly obsessed with stats maybe. But if you have something to share then you want to share it. I would defy any blogger to say that they never look at stats, or never feel a little bit pleased when a post is really popular. As human beings I don’t think we can deny that we want to feel loved, we want to feel accepted. If you put yourself out there (and writing is very personal) then you want people to respond, of course you do.

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So where do we draw the line and who even draws it anyway? Like anything, we have to make that choice ourselves. As someone said to me this week, if you are running a business and that business is yourself then you need to publicise ‘you’. But when is that too much? do we have rules: how many tweets, how many posts, how many ‘look this is what I’m doing this week’ posts?

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fearfullyJPGAs a society we live in an age of self-promotion. That’s what’s social media is all about, sharing the ‘me’ that ‘I’ want people to see, with those around me. And again, who would say that they don’t secretly quite like it when a post gets masses of ‘likes’? I’ve written before about the dangers of this, the younger crowd with their constant ‘like for a rate’ posts, ‘like for like’, ‘I follow back’ and all that, yes there is a danger of becoming so full of pride that we are selfish and self-centred. We do need to be aware of that. But there is nothing wrong with embracing who God made us to be, to recognise those gifts, to use them and to yes, be proud of them! After all he gave them to us…

So then, let’s celebrate the awesomeness of God in us, rather than being falsely humble or tearing apart each others personal ‘brand’ (and I blame the Daily Mail for that little trait…). We are all much better than that…

 

For various reasons this post has been edited from the original.

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