I've found myself writing less because there was something I actually wanted to write or to communicate, and more because through writing I was able to discover what it was that I wanted to say. It was an example of what might be called the pen and paper equivalent of thinking out loud. If these columns are nothing more than that, then this particular column can end here . And that of course means that, to my mind at least, there really is something about the web that generates a feeling of responsibility toward an unseen readership. And that's what I want to try and examine in the rest of this column.
People present themselves differently in public than they do in private.
There's nothing new about that. As an elementary school teacher I discovered that children who never paid attention to spelling mistakes on work that they presented me were willing to make correction after correction if their work was posted on the class bulletin board. We generally don't encounter that same sort of problem with print media such as books, simply because the publishing industry has means by which spelling errors, factual inaccuracies and other embarrassing mistakes are identified before things get sent to the printer. Since much of web publishing is a personal medium that doesn't require intermediary steps such as a copy editor, people who publish their writing on the web have to be careful to check their work before posting, or to be ready to make continual corrections . But that's not the comparison I'm trying to get to.