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Alex, I like your idea that the only reason blogging feels more "true" than academic writing is because of its immediacy, and that academic writing is useful because over time you see the way your writing has changed. I think Borges would say that bloggers feel that their blog writing more accurately depicts themselves only because they are closer to being the same person they were when they wrote it than they are to being the person who wrote an academic paper 4 years ago. That was confusing, but basically it gets back to the idea that your own persona is constantly changing, so putting anything into writing is problematic if you are trying to convey your "real" self. You can only ever convey yourself as you were in one moment in time (Borges in Borges y yo: "only one instant of myself can survive in him"). Combine this problem with the idea that every word has a slightly different meaning for every person (I think this is Derrida's idea), and it becomes apparent that no piece of writing can depict someone's 'real' self in accurate detail.

In response to your question, Christina, I would say defintely both--a constructed persona serves both to cover and hide our "real" selves, in that with every word we write online we are choosing to put forth some aspects of ourselves and to leave others "unsaid," unrevealed. My favorite line from Borges y yo is when he says he recognizes himself less in his own writing than in other things, like music or other books. I think even bloggers like Laura, who put up many aspects of their lives, always have to leave some things about themselves unsaid, because we can't know everything about ourselves--some things are revealed to us through art and other people better than we could express them ourselves. But these things we can't express are still part of us. We need other people to fully understand ourselves. So some parts of ourselves we are unable, by ourselves, to uncover with a constructed persona even if we wanted to.