The nature of the Internet

Since I am, at 60 years of age, relatively ancient for a blogger, I grew up in an era when print was king, and, apparently, there are some aspects of electronic media that I haven't gotten used to. Imagine, if you can, that you write a movie review for the alumni newsletter of an obscure college that's largely unknown beyond a 200-mile radius--and that, a week later, you get a letter from the film's director. In your wildest dreams, would you ever have imagined that such a person would even be aware of the existence of such a publication, much less pay attention to it? That's how I felt when the editor of the Koren Sacks Siddur (prayer book) commented on the post I published about that siddur. It never occurred to me that any person of such importance (adam chashuv?) would even be aware of my blog's existence, much less read it, much less comment on it. I can only assume that Rabbi/Dr./Mr.(?) Freeman has software installed on his computer that notifies him whenever the name "Koren" appears on the Internet. Frankly, it freaked the heck out of me (in case my slang is already outdated, that means "I was thoroughly unnerved") to have my complaint about what I thought was simply an uncorrected spelling error questioned as a possible challenge to the meaning of a Talmudic quote. I'm not even learnèd enough to give an adequate response.

The moral of this story is "blogger, beware." I may have thought that I was writing for the fourteen or so people who read this blog on a reasonably regular basis. (I'm so technologically impaired that I can't even read my statistics properly--I don't really know how many regular readers I have.) But anyone can be reading, at any time. I'll have to be more careful about what I write.


I was a bit too preoccupied with a combination of major projects at the office and my mother's last days to submit any of these posts to Haveil Havalim at the time, so I'm going to cheat and post a link for anyone who might not have read my Orthodox and non-Orthodox Judaism series.