Do Resolutions Need Witnesses to Count?

Why ever do people post their New Year’s resolutions on the Internet? What drives them to share with us their foibles and failings?

If you type “New Year’s Resolutions” into your search engine, you’ll find pages and pages. The guy named Brad, for instance, resolved in 1996 “to stop using Roman numerals” and “to listen to more Enya music.” A guy named Adam had goals that included “Stop letting fear make my decisions for me. Get a job. Get a car. Do more, think less. Get out more.”

By plastering their resolutions on their home pages, they hang their laundry lists out for everyone to see. Adam’s reasoning was this: “What good is a New Year’s resolution if you don’t tell anyone about it?”

The desire to make personal resolutions has deep American roots. In his autobiography, a reflective Benjamin Franklin laid out a list of virtues that he aspired to. One of them was resolution. “Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.” In his pursuit of self-perfection, Franklin even made a chart of desirable characteristics--temperance, silence, frugality, etc.--and as he thought he incorporated each into his daily habits, he crossed it off his list.

Today, a voyage through the digital world reveals that for many folks and organizations, resolutions are very public things.

The online health magazine thrive offers a fill-in-the-blank contract you can draw up with yourself and a message board where you can compare your resolutions with those of others. The Vices & Virtues area of America Online offers a chance to hook up with a “Resolutions Buddy” who’ll keep an eye on you.

For those resolute on making resolutions, a virtual treatment center called Brainwave offers psychobabbling explanations about why resolutions can be so hard to keep. The Small Business Journal provides yawningly obvious guidelines for business people who want to make resolutions.

Some groups are presumptuous enough to recommend resolutions to us. For example, the American Medical Assn. tells us on several medical bulletin boards to put kids in the backseat and to stop smoking cigars.

An editor of the online magazine GaySource has posted two dozen resolutions, including these: “Eat healthy! I once met a cute boy while reaching for Annie’s Goddess Dressing at the health food store.”

This being the nutty Internet, where everybody gets in on the act, there’s even Theresa Venette’s New Year’s Resolutions for Stitchers, including, “I resolve not to stitch when other people need my attention,” and, “I resolve to be nice to my framer.”

One online venture, called Woman, solicited resolutions for 1997. The responses seem to be split between “those who simply decided not to make another empty promise to themselves, and a good number who haven’t waited until the new year to turn over a new leaf--they just put their intentions into action at the time they were conceived,” e-mailed editor Barbara Walton.

Of all the resolution-making trends we’ve found in cyberspace, this last one seems to be the healthiest.

You can also resolve to find Franklin’s delightful, if somewhat smug, “Autobiography” at InterGO Communications and download all 388,674 bytes of it. Or you can, as Adam says, “get out more” and borrow the book from your public library.

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Getting There

* Brainwave is at https://www.brainwavetx.com/library/newyrsrs.html

* Small Business Journal is at https://www.tsbj.com/199601/0196-03.htm

* thrive is at https://cgi.pathfinder.com/cgi-bin/gdml2x/game/thrive/resolution

* GaySource is at https://gaysource.com/ds/ht/jan96/editor.html

* Stitchers is at https://www.luminet.net/~tvenette/newyear.html

* Woman magazine is at https://www.toolcity.net/~lmassung/Woman12/resolutn.html

* InterGO is at https://www.teachersoft.com/Library/nonfict/biog/franklin/contents.htm