All these things
I've been thinking about something a friend said to me in an email: "I'm getting to know about you more through this site than in face-to-face conversation". I was startled to read this comment, but it underlined something I have been starting to feel recently. That is, from being originally an undertaking of novelty at a low point, my blog is becoming something reassuringly close to me. Writing it is something I look forward to, and I love it being read by others. So, a couple of months into this practice, I have been asking myself just how much am I as I am through my blog, rather than "in person".
Let's start by making the following assumption - when we write, we do so consciously for an audience. Be that in a letter, a report, a story, a schedule, an application, we usually have an idea of who will read these words - ourselves, friends, authorities, etc. - and this naturally influences the tone, register and diction.
This gives rise to the first significant question - who reads this blog, anyhow? The audience that I am aware of is confined to a small web coterie: my close friends, bloggers from Stateside (the USA is way ahead of us in terms of general web literacy), and maybe some other randoms from across the web. So, only a few people, their readership mostly solicited and certainly selective. Are there any people I have deliberately chosen not to publicise to? Certainly - the content is usually free from directed bile, but I know that most people would simply not be interested. Yes, the site is public access, but somehow I doubt there'd be much traffic even out of general interest.
Writing my blog often feels like an act of self-definition - by, in and for itself. Is that to say, I am inventing myself in the writing of its content? Perhaps, but not entirely. I'd like to think that my blog is a place for unfettered self-expression. It has become a mode of expressing my sense of self, whatever that may be. For the deconstructionists out there, the idea of expressing self immutably would appear shaky at best - so perhaps I should say that my words are remnant: a mere carcass clothed in the flesh of the reader's mindcasts.
Like any piece of writing, there is editorial control - things get written, mostly published, some rejected. In this sense, the content of my blog is not a pure window into the mind. Face it, how unrealistic would that be, in any case? It is, however, more open than a journal. Let's draw a distinction between the blog and a personal diary. Unlike a journal, the likes of which I have kept before (and done so with no intention of sharing with anyone), the fact that my blog is in the public domain necessarily forces a different perspective. This is not to say that I am less likely to be open. In fact, I feel less the need to be guarded with a blog than with journal. A journal that's written as an analogue of one's inner privacy means that it is inevitably shadowed by the possibility of unwanted revelation - the journal could be lost or stolen, its contents exposed and its privacy compromised. Hence, the irony is that the journal ends up being more tightly controlled, and as it becomes more populated with words there is a tendency to be more circumspect, to protect against risk.
Stylistically, my journal was pretty awful. Its poverty found expression at two competing extremes: there were of course the lapses in rhapsody (mostly laziness) where entries were separated by weeks rather than daily; more than this however, when in flow it took itself much too seriously, and ended up being somewhat anally retentive: I was too much concerned with releasing shit, and ended up holding back.
Where does this leave us? I say things I want to share with people, but this coincides with my current willingness to share things that I wouldn't normally. I can say things that are outside conventions of conversation, things that would be out of place or unexpected. In this sense, I am freer through my blog.
So, for now, I guess this blog will indeed be neither more nor less "me" than even the "real life" me. It'll just be me in and as myself - whatever you take that to be.
Let's start by making the following assumption - when we write, we do so consciously for an audience. Be that in a letter, a report, a story, a schedule, an application, we usually have an idea of who will read these words - ourselves, friends, authorities, etc. - and this naturally influences the tone, register and diction.
This gives rise to the first significant question - who reads this blog, anyhow? The audience that I am aware of is confined to a small web coterie: my close friends, bloggers from Stateside (the USA is way ahead of us in terms of general web literacy), and maybe some other randoms from across the web. So, only a few people, their readership mostly solicited and certainly selective. Are there any people I have deliberately chosen not to publicise to? Certainly - the content is usually free from directed bile, but I know that most people would simply not be interested. Yes, the site is public access, but somehow I doubt there'd be much traffic even out of general interest.
Writing my blog often feels like an act of self-definition - by, in and for itself. Is that to say, I am inventing myself in the writing of its content? Perhaps, but not entirely. I'd like to think that my blog is a place for unfettered self-expression. It has become a mode of expressing my sense of self, whatever that may be. For the deconstructionists out there, the idea of expressing self immutably would appear shaky at best - so perhaps I should say that my words are remnant: a mere carcass clothed in the flesh of the reader's mindcasts.
Like any piece of writing, there is editorial control - things get written, mostly published, some rejected. In this sense, the content of my blog is not a pure window into the mind. Face it, how unrealistic would that be, in any case? It is, however, more open than a journal. Let's draw a distinction between the blog and a personal diary. Unlike a journal, the likes of which I have kept before (and done so with no intention of sharing with anyone), the fact that my blog is in the public domain necessarily forces a different perspective. This is not to say that I am less likely to be open. In fact, I feel less the need to be guarded with a blog than with journal. A journal that's written as an analogue of one's inner privacy means that it is inevitably shadowed by the possibility of unwanted revelation - the journal could be lost or stolen, its contents exposed and its privacy compromised. Hence, the irony is that the journal ends up being more tightly controlled, and as it becomes more populated with words there is a tendency to be more circumspect, to protect against risk.
Stylistically, my journal was pretty awful. Its poverty found expression at two competing extremes: there were of course the lapses in rhapsody (mostly laziness) where entries were separated by weeks rather than daily; more than this however, when in flow it took itself much too seriously, and ended up being somewhat anally retentive: I was too much concerned with releasing shit, and ended up holding back.
Where does this leave us? I say things I want to share with people, but this coincides with my current willingness to share things that I wouldn't normally. I can say things that are outside conventions of conversation, things that would be out of place or unexpected. In this sense, I am freer through my blog.
So, for now, I guess this blog will indeed be neither more nor less "me" than even the "real life" me. It'll just be me in and as myself - whatever you take that to be.
posted by nickwong8 at 11:30 pm
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