Readers and writers blog

You’d have any number of reasons to add dooce to your blogroll. The only one we care about is whether the writing is good, and Heather B. Armstrong’s weblog certainly qualifies on that count.

But there are other reasons: Now in its seventh year, dooce is not only one of the longest-lived weblogs in a cyberworld where lifetimes are measured in months, but also one of its most popular. And that is largely because it is written by a woman who rebels against her upbringing as a Mormon in Baptist-Belt Tennessee, battles depression, struggles with parenthood, flirts with substance abuse and, due to her explicit vocabulary, offends some of her readers and most of the residents where she now lives — of all places, Salt Lake City.

In fact, it’s her aggressive independence that in the early days of her blog got her fired from her job, a dismissal that raised an important debate about Internet privacy but that she never challenged. Instead, she warns others: “Be ye not so stupid.”

A vestige of the debate is a new cyber word, ‘dooced’ — its origin supposedly is a quickly mistyped ‘dude’ — that means to lose your job for something you write on the Internet.

Thematically, the issue fits into the last two entries on our weblog — June 11, A Gentleman’s C, written by a professor who doesn’t identify her school, lists no email address and uses a fake headshot, and June 14, Axis of Evel Knievel, written by another professor who doesn’t mask his identity but wonders if he’ll be fired.

I have no answer to the issue, except I’m not surprised Armstrong was fired, even from a dot-com company supposedly dedicated to creating more open communication. I once worked for a newspaper, a very good newspaper, that changed my personal columns when they didn’t fit the editor’s views. (I’ve never understood why a company that insists on candor from its news sources can’t seem to tolerate it in its own employees.)

So I’m a big fan of Armstrong’s independence as well as her writing, even though the content occasionally seems sardonic:

For example, I don’t know what to make of an entry March 5, 2002, titled “Road Kill”:

I once ran over a bird with my car . . . There were actually two birds, but I only hit and killed one of them . . . I’m pretty sure that the bird I killed was in love with the bird I did not kill (because the surviving bird) landed close to the dead bird’s body and started crying . . . If the birds really were related, if they really were siblings or a mother and child combo, then I would have turned my car around, sped back to the scene and killed the other bird. The world just doesn’t need incestuous birds.

And I’m not sure I share her feeling, expressed Feb. 22, that Britney Spears needs compassion for the sake of her two baby boys.

But Armstrong certainly doesn’t deserve emails so nasty — “I can’t help but think that bad things keep happening to you because you are a bad person . . . When your child gets older and goes to school, everyone there could know that her mother is literally crazy. Imagine how hard that will be for her” — that she disables her blog’s comment function.

And I certainly feel compassion for a woman who writes in her Jan. 26, 2005, entry:

One of the most terrifying moments of my life was walking into our bedroom the afternoon we came home from the hospital, two days after giving birth to Leta. I was stitched up to my chin, but the physical pain paled in comparison to the shocking realization that I was now The Mother, that there was no longer a nurse to whom I could hand off the baby. It was like I was peering into the heart of a black hole, the magnitude of my life now swallowing me whole.

The website, Armstrong says, “has been the biggest component in my fight against depression.”

May dooce continue far into the future.

– Sid Leavitt