I interviewed a person i know a few days ago about hir blog/journal. S/he talked about writing as a form of cathartic processing. S/he got to write down hir thoughts and share them with hir friends who would know when to comment and when to just let hir process. At one point, s/he looked at me and said: remember when you used to blog for that?
Wow… i really did use to process unfinished thoughts, personal frustrations, frameworks i was trying to construct… all in my various web journals. I didn’t have to defend myself to strangers; my friends were totally constructive in their critiques. I didn’t need to remember to be formal; i was allowed to be half-baked.
Now blogging is this psycho addiction. I’m aware of having an audience of unknowns, but trying to put on blinders just to write. I want the cathartic processing, but i want to share some of my findings/ideas with the world. They don’t both fit into the same forum, even though i try. I write so that i don’t lose track of thoughts. Yet, i am only able to deal with comments and people on occasion. I struggle to find the appropriate voice. Another friend told me that my blog tended to have a lot of content, personalized. I’m not sure if that’s good or bad. Then again, i was told that my thesis looked like a stream of consciousness writing. It was.
As i interview people about their regrets, i start to wonder if i’ll have my own. Will i regret blogging? I try not to live in regrets, or rather, i try to forget that which i might regret. Yet, is forgetting possible?
Perhaps this is partly due to the ‘mainstreaming’ of blogging and the fact that it is now used by journalists etcetera? the fact that people now expect blog entries to be complete, rounded out discussions of ideas with validating links. Whereas, many of us are still using blogs as publically aired research journals or scrap-books of ideas that we want to share with friends or potential networks of like-minded people.
We demand the right to remain half-arsed!!
You can also use access control – make public only polished entries, restrict the stream of consciousness to people “you know.” I’m influenced here, of course, by livejournal, but the principle should work in general.
As for using blogs as research journals — I do, sort of, with the caveat that I never put anything up if I plan to seriously work on it.
Surely what is also grinding on you is the change in your own social status over the last few years? You were interviewed in the New York Times. How many professionals from the Fortune 500 were reading you 4 years ago?
It is, partly, simply one those things people go through during their 20s and 30s. If they are successful, their social status goes up, and they have to deal with the changing pressures.
Please realize that i’m aware of all of the changes both in myself, my audience and the mainstreaming effect. I’m taking a moment to make a note of something that is personally sad, in a public fashion. As far as ACL, there are a lot of reasons why that hasn’t worked for me in the past. I’m not really looking for answers, but just reminiscing.
You could also be feeling the effect of patriarchy. I have been thinking lately about the long history of women’s literary activity in diaries, personal letters then later collected and published, personal letters never published but that inspired whole circles of other writers male and female to new ideas, and epistolary novels. Blogging might be a wonderful extension of the tendency to treat writing as an intimate community – its intense personal dynamic goes hand in hand with its illegitimacy as an art form. As with letters and diaries the means of production is not out of reach. The French “ex-Saint-Simonian” women of the early 1800s and, say, the Bluestockings, are good examples, but if you poke into nearly any writerly life you find these fireballs of writing that have an uneasy consciousness of being on the line between personal communication and “art” i.e. production for an anonymous audience.
Why you have inspired me to go on like this at 7 in the morning, I am not sure – you and the coffee – but thanks, and I’m so pleased to find a new blog to read.
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Sorry that i am a bit of topic here.
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