People on facebook...

There are all these new blogs and independent kinds of comix that I am getting into, and all these people are on facebook. I want to know about the Internet etiquette for dealing with whether or not I am allowed to facebookstalk them if they have their names, nay, their email addresses all over their websites. Can I be their friends if I like their blog, or should I just comment on their blog and leave it at that?


The internet just opens up the whole world to new ways to make friends, but also possibilities of embarrassing yourself.

'the bloggers'

Today I read an article that made a reference to 'the bloggers' in an account of a family feud lived on the internet over an autism charity. Some member of the family had posted one thing on some other website about autism treatments, and then the family charity said on their website that that member did not represent the views of the charity, and that the feud heated up when, 'the bloggers caught wind of it' or something, and insults were being flug left and right.

It was striking to me that a whole slew of people that write about any number of things would be classified with such a blanket term as, 'the bloggers.' Are these people specifically people who concern themselves with celebrity gossip, or charities, or autism, or the media, or what? What does it mean that things got worse once lots of people (and what people?) started writing about it? These are things that are more about the blogger as the everyman journalist, I suppose, but it still seemed like something interesting at the least.

I done good.

I graduated! And I ended up doing well in my classes after all. Things are looking alright, and I really do like the idea that this is still here waiting for me. Who knew.

New Beginnings

This is the last post I will write that will count for a grade. Whether or not the absence of a class will really end this blog is yet to be determined. Now that the pressure is off, I’m starting to get into it, but we’ll see if that survives the summer. But, as the blog and internet goes, I’ll have it for as long as it doesn’t get deleted, so it is also conceivable that I might come back to it after a little while if I fall off the wagon. It will exist even if it ceases to live, or something. All that said, with my own commencement only days away, I wanted to write a new beginning for this project; a new proposal to think about the principle questions that I was asked at the beginning of the semester when it began:
What am I doing?
Why am I doing it?
From reflecting on the posts I’ve made thus far, in addition to the articles I read, and recollections of meetings with my professor, I have begun to re-envision the purpose of this project, my blog, and what I want it to be.

At once I want it to be a place where I can remember to try to be in play —in the sense of questioning, re-imagining, deconstructing, thinking about, deriving meaning from and engaging with — texts. Right now that means specifically with the blog text, and might grow to mean the internet text, or the whole Text with a capital T. Baby steps. Hopefully this will help me learn what it means to be in play, to get to the place where I don’t know where I’m going. I want it to be a place where I can be in the constant state of “working it out,” so much so that it becomes play and never gets worked out. I want the experience of the play to be mediated through this blog. This will hopefully help fulfill another goal that I have for it, which is that it will serve as an outlet for me to maintain a rich intellectual life after college. Though I don’t think the tone will be quite the same as being academic, I want to remember to think about things the way I thought about them in college, and have practice thinking about them this way after I am no longer in this kind of environment. Hopefully this will stem the flow of forgetting, and even if I’m not writing papers anymore, at least I can still think about things.

I will continue to write about blogs and blogging, but with newfound knowledge and a little bit of insight. At this point I’m more interested in looking at blogging as a practice and how it exists within (what once was) a tangible textual framework of paper and limited dimension. I want to look more at internet theory, or at least the theory behind the internet text, and think about if it relates to the theory that came before, as well as how it might. I’m still interested in my writing problem, and mastery of text, so some of what I write about will probably be about HOW to write. A new vision of writing. But, while I keep the theory I want to write more thoroughly about blogs. I want to read them, keep track of them, think about their content, become hooked on them. I learned how to read books before I learned how to talk about books, and I watched movies before I learned how to talk about movies: it follows that I should read blogs before I can learn how to talk about them. I want to look at what the blogs mean for the theory and what the theory means for the blogs, and become a discourse. From this it seems that I cannot have one without the other: I don’t want either to exist in a void without the other. I want the chicken and the egg.

In terms of the kinds of blogs I want to read… I am still interested in the personal blog, how it functions as a memory space and a representation of the self, public versus private, orality versus textuality, etc., etc., etc. At this point, I am more interested in looking at why people say they do it, what it means for their self-understanding, and the self-conscious reasoning behind starting an online diary, because I think not accounting for the personal reasons why people do what they do (or at least, why they think they do what they do) would be a bit hypocritical, at this point. Part of the interest lies in my feeling that this project in the hands of other people for other reasons would turn out differently, and I think the same goes for any blog, but especially for something so personally motivated as a diary. People’s diaries are all the same (essentially, maybe) but I think there is something so fundamental in dairy writing and memory recording that is located in the reasoning behind the preservation, the compulsion to do it in the first place.

I’m also interested in reading more blogs like mine, blogs about blogging and other blogs. Sort of like the blogs written by academics like I’ve talked about before, but also just reviews of blogs, about blog culture, blog posting, and the world of the blog in general. I mean, this is a meta-blog. It could be a meta blog about other meta blogs and be the ultimate meta. Hehe. I’m also starting to get interested in blogs about other media like movies or TV, and blogs with references to pop culture. I don’t think I’ll be completely indiscriminate about them, but I think my breadth of interest will be sufficintely represented on the blog as I write about them (meaning that if I think something is really interesting, I’ll write about it a lot). At this point, I feel like if I’m going to be overwhelmed then I might as well be properly overwhelmed. Lately I’ve been thinking about it like going to browse in a huge bookstore and not knowing where to start, but just going, and not feeling so much pressure because it isn’t like the books are going to disappear. This is a little different because there are (I think) way more, in a really consolidated place, and one can lead to another and lead to another, deeper and deeper forever and infinity. But… they aren’t going to disappear. So I’ll be able to read the ones I want and pass up the ones I don’t like.

In terms of the future of the blog in general, if I want to do things the way I’ve outlined above, I really need to post more. A blog can exist with infrequent posts, but if I want this to basically be a mediated thought process of text in play, then it definitely won’t do to post so infrequently. Maybe that will work if I’m not thinking about it a lot, or… the blog will become something else entirely, which I also want to remain possible. However, if I do keep up with it and want it to grow, maybe I’ll learn some basic HTML and make it look pretty. Or at least prettier. Or at least so people can see the blogs I read. I wouldn’t want it to be overwhelming, but perhaps not so sparse. I also would want to start commenting on other people’s blogs, in the hopes that maybe they would comment on mine. It could turn into a conversation between bloggers, their blogs, and their text.

Even though this isn’t at all what I imagined happening with this project, I’m satisfied with the way that it turned out. I like the idea that having a problem with something doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m an idiot. I’m starting to dig the sort of quizzical look at the world and how it’s interesting, and how the different ways one looks and processes media is just interesting, a subject onto itself, and doesn’t say anything about me as a person. I’ll probably be working that one around for a little bit more, but at least now I’ll have someplace to do that. Also, I’m used to big huge hard projects being really stressful; if it isn’t stressful, I might be doing it wrong. And while this stressed me out quite a bit for awhile, I feel like I got over it. I’m about to push the ‘publish’ button and I’m not freaking out. It’s a nice feeling.

And with all that, I am done with college. Thanks for reading this big long post. So commences the rest of my life, with my blog in tow…

Hmmm...

I've been thinking the last couple of days about what I want this blog to be. I think the sentiment has been weaving itself in and around the things I've been posting. But, getting to that later...

Right now I'm sort of looking at both what I want it to be and how it can be that. Lately (again) I've been reading a lot of people's blogs who turn out to be English and media faculty at various colleges and universities... and I really like them. And my first instinct is for my blog to be like theirs, and I want to be able to do everything they can do, i.e. they can write intelligently and interestingly about blogs/ the media/ different media/ etc.... and then I almost start to feel hopeless because I will never be able to do that, and my blog will never be that, I'd get overwhelmed, and the self-doubt song and dance starts again. I mean, I am graduating and I obviously must know everything that those people know, those people with years of experience in the world of the academy, who have been trained to take media and absorb it in a certain way. Right?

Uh, no.

Right now I have (will soon have, same diff) an undergraduate degree. And I am sure this project, and this process would have gone a whole lot differently for me had I been a big blogger during my four years here, or paid attention to blogs at all, but I wasn't and I didn't. Where does that leave me in the face of these academic bigwigs? Just because I am about to graduate doesn't mean that I expect that I am now at the level where I could write a scholarly article for a journal... why do I expect that my blog can be at the "level" of their blogs? Is it partially to do with the democratization of publishing? Because it is true, even if my blog looks sparser and no one reads it... my textual endeavor is inhabiting the same space as theirs. It isn't a school paper that is only for my professor to their Jstor criticism for their colleagues and peers... our publishing is a theoretical one to one. At this point, I am looking at what they are doing, and trying to see how it can be imitated, because that is partially how I learned to write for school:
1. read a LOT. (Somehow without getting overwhelmed. That still seems like a key step I'm missing. Do I just not care, and read what I can, or what I think is interesting?) Reading and responding seems like a preferred method: they are all in dialogue.
2. post more. That kind of goes without saying, but alas... how to respond if you don't post?
3. Being self-aware and a little meta about things: acknowledging the things you're doing and why you're doing and what you think is interesting and why also seems like a running theme, which I think I am covering to a degree, if ever so less eloquently.
4. Though posting more is good, sometimes per post less is more. A few sentences of commentary sometimes will suffice, especially if it looks like it is between that and writing nothing.
5. Editing your writing (I think this might become a future goal, because right now that's too much stuff to think about. Who cares if the writing is bad if no one is reading it anyway?)

While I feel that these are all good things for me to think about, I definitely don't want to get too wrapped up in thinking that this pseudo- intellectual wannabe academic blog writing is the only way to go. While immediately it looks like that is the kind of thing I find most interesting and close to what I'd like to be doing, or at least what I'd be wanting to aim for, I know I'm not at all quite there yet, and I want to experiment with other kinds of writing, layout, and ways of thinking in terms of HOW I can get there, without purely imitating... because I know that will only take me so far (just as it did in school).

time stamping

I read this article where it said time stamping was really essential to the nature and the identity of a blog as a textual thing. Because it makes it different from a webpage because things come up in reverse chronological order and it is a changing thing because of the archives and stuff. But on blogger, you can totally go back and edit/ delete your posts, as well as change the time stamp on things. It makes it so unless someone had been reading a blog along the whole time, you could totally write a whole blog in like, three months (or I dunno, however long it takes to write a book) and post things all at once, and the blog would just APPEAR and not be immediate. Or you could lie and write two posts in a day but have them be timestamped on different days... or you could accidentally refer to something a bunch of times without saying what it was, and then go back and timestamp something before you started reffering to it and say what it was so all the other posts makes sense.

I dunno. I kind of like it (and have used it for this blog when I have two things to post that are totally different, like writing one and saving it for a day to post it) but I think its really weird that:
a. I feel like I am manipulating time and
b. that people (pretty universally) think of a timestamp as a defining characteristic of the blog and you can basically manipulate it all you want.
c. that we have the ability to manipulate it in the first place. why is that even a feature?

Although it seems like you can do some pretty interesting stuff with that. Like I could go back and fill in the blanks of high-school internet me as (almost) post-college me via my internet blog and no one would really know that I'd done anything, because of the timestamp. I could have written that whole blog this semester too, and who would know? I guess there are some people who read it while I was writing it (maybe?) but still... That's kind of crazy.

blogs I've seen and things

I feel kind of bad because I haven't really kept a running tally of the blogs I've seen around, meaning mostly I haven't kept track of the links. At some point I'd really like to start keeping a list of bookmarks or something, even if I don't read the blogs again, but so I can at least remember the links for the ones that are interesting. But I want to start to read some on a regular basis... like I read the new york times. Like I check my email. If this is going to be something I want to continue I want it to become a bit more of a habit, and I really should learn more about how to have things on a blogroll and make the page not look quite so barren. I'm still thinking about what I'd actually want to write about on here...

which takes me back to all these blogs I've seen, but hadn't really thought about as relevant, but really they are all important to looking at how this whole text thing works. I guess any blog can be a personal blog, because there is something about the person in all that writing somewhere, but the diary ones are still my main interest, even if they are all really dead or teenagers are the only ones who write on them and I have to move on to another genre soon. The ones I like the most are the ones that have a little bit of everything — I read one by this professor at Claremont who writes about conferences she's going to, her research and papers, grading things, pop culture and movies she's seen, and her every day life (which is kind of weird even though she's not my professor... what? Professors have lives?)... anyway, her whole blog is pretty interesting, because it isn't really about any one thing. But there are definitely blogs that are interesting because of what they say about music, or politics, or moustaches (seriously... I saw this one that was basically a virtual moustache growing contest. Woah).

And for all of them, my interest in their content is definitely dependent on the way they are written, or at least the personality that comes through people's writing. Which is personal... even if none of it necessarily shows me anything about what/ who they are as a person. I don't really know where that leaves me in terms of thinking blogs are cool in general as a textual problem, but I kind of am thinking that's always going to be there and I need to move on, but just not get overwhelmed.

I'm kind of liking this twisty-turny writing where I sit down to say something and sort of just go instead of planning things out, or knowing what I'm going to say. I mean, I like that I wanted to sit down and say something about the moustache blog and the other blog, but I wasn't sure what and its interesting for me turn around and look at where I went. Like wandering around somewhere without a map and then figuring out later if your route made sense. Architecture analogies are really nice for me in this context, I think.

Journaling in general

It has still been really funny to me when people ask me if I'm done yet. my token response so far has been to just say, "Basically."

I read some of my old blog. It's kind of funny... I don't know if I write that way in my paper journal also, and that its less annoying for me to read over that way because I know I'm the only one who's been able to read it, or if I was just really irritating as a teenager. In an effort to not be self-depricating, I'll venture that perhaps it has something to do with the way I was compelled to write, in what seems an almost loud, boasting, way because of the public publishing aspect of it. Sometimes when I read my paper journals from middle school and high school (and even, if I'm honest, from the first half of college)- I get so embarassed by them that I have to cover my face and hide the book under the covers in shame, until I recover. I don't read them all that often, but I did last semester for this art project I did, and it was really interesting how intense a reaction I had: pure, red-faced embarassment, and no one else was even reading them... but I ended up using some things for the project and they weren't embarassing. I wonder why that was my reaction. The on-line one is also a little embarassing, but the more I read it the more I find myself being more irritated. Like I'm embarassed compounded by that I am embarassing myself in front of a lot of people. Humiliating things are always worse when they happen in front of other people. Does danah boyd get embarassed by her posts from college? Will I, even with this copious amount of self-consciously trying to NOT be embarrassed, be embarassed/ irritated by this by this when I am 25? Or when I go to grad school, if I ever end up going?

I wonder if there ever becomes a time when I don't have to work anymore to not be self-conscious. I feel like that really defeats the purpose of it.

(In)completeness and academic mumbo jumbo

I got an academic incomplete for this project, in order to have more time to post a little more before I graduate. It was more than a little symbolic for me, because I've never taken an academic incomplete (because I've always just wanted to get the shit done, no matter what tax it may have on my mental or physical health, it wouldn't be worth it for finals to continue any more than they had to and I probably still wouldn't work on it until the last minute anyway) and I didn't really need to take one for this... I mean, if I really had wanted to I could have written a shitty paper. But since I am not writing a shitty paper, and instead I am bringing this blog under control, (or rather, attempting to let the blog/myself rear out of control) I decided that an incomplete would be a really good way to give myself into that feeling: that I'm not done, that I haven't said all that I wanted to say, that I haven't even begun to say anything or nothing and that for once, I want to be done when I'm actually DONE, instead of being done at some arbitrary point when my paper/ project/ whatever is due. Because really, this thing is different. What I've done is different, what I'm doing is different, and what I will do will be different than what I've done before in school: you can't really edit a paper after you turn it in. I mean, you can I guess, but who does that? It's not like anyone is going to read it again after that, and honestly I cannot imagine going back to any of the stuff I've written during college and revising it. (Woah. Now that would be some senior project... revising every other English paper you'd ever written. What a horrible thought.) I mean, why do it when you were theoretically done with it? But this medium is a little different. my professor will come on-line, read it, and then it will still sit there, on the internet, for whoever wants to look at it, and for me, whenever I decide I want to write on it again. That's the thing with the immediacy of this kind of publishing... it is happening as I write, as I think, which makes it different than a paper or a book. It has infinite potential.

Today is the first day of finals, and I finished my documentary last night an hour before the screening. That was really the thing that became my culminating triumph of college, the thing that became my huge senior achievement, and this has become something else. Naturally, the first day of finals, all anyone wants to know about anyone is when they're "done." Everyone is walking around tweaked out and crazy, just wanting to get over those last huge hurdles standing between them and the summer, and for me, what seems like a huge black hole of uncertainty — the rest of my life stretches before me, and I've jumped the hugest hurdle. This isn't so much a hurdle as I wanted to have a little more content and contemplative space. But when people have been asking me if I'm done, I've said, "Sorta," and shrugged. It's hard to explain that at this point it looks like I might not ever be done. I don't know if the nature of this medium will allow for that. It is infintitely current and will be on the internet for a long time. Anyway... so how it goes. Even though I said this project turned into something not very academic, I still think it can become something for my intellectual space. I worry that after college I won't have a rich intellectual life, and I'll stop reading and just watch shitty reality TV all day. This way, even if I do end up watching shitty reality tv all day, I can go to the blog and talk about the meaning of reality tv and identity in pop culture, and what it means for a text to identify as real and blah blah blah.

Or not. Or at least, not exactly like that. I'd like for this to be a place where I can talk about things and why they are interesting, but I don't know if I really want to talk about intertextuality, or theory, or any of that mumbo jumbo. One of the reasons I cited to my professor yesterday for having such a hard time getting this thing moving at all is my incredible self-conciousness with academic writing, and how it takes me a really long time to write papers, and that its really hard for me to turn that jargon on and off. It doesn't seem to be that way for a lot of people... judging by the inane but smart-sounding things people often say in class, but its hard for me. I always need analogies I can hold on to, or to equate things with things I know. There's the old self-doubt: feeling like my writing should be better after four years at such a prestegious school. Whatever. I don't want to give up on things entirely, but I'm tired of worrying about seeming stupid. So I'm not going to anymore (even though up to now, I think I haven't been writing about anything particularly well or insightfully). I'm not apologizing. That's the beauty of the blog: even though this is all a public venture, it's still not really something public cause you still have to search for it. And who wants to read mini academic papers every day? Not me. And who wants to write them? Also not me. I will write it how I see it and I will write what I want in whatever way I want and be in play.

Play. Playing is supposed to be fun. So I'm going to make it fun.

Dimensions

I don't know if this medium will ever reach its full potential until it becomes 3-D and I can walk around inside the internet. It already feels as though sometimes there are ways that it feels 3-D because I can go deeper and deeper in, and get lost, and not know how I got somewhere. But there is always the back button to get you out, and the little x or apple q to get rid of the window. So the interface is not 3-D, while it seems as though the text is.

being a blogger

I wonder how much being a blogger means in the context of people's identities. Do people think of themselves as "bloggers"? Am I a blogger? The reason I'm thinking about this is because I've read several people's blogs of late where they too, comment about being a 'bad' blogger because they haven't been posting a lot, or their posts have been really short. Granted these are people who have Blogs with a capital 'B'... with things on the side like blogrolls and hit counts, and really cool graphics on their page, where a lot of people comment, and they have their own domain name. Like casey.com. I don't know how to do any of those things... does that make me a bad blogger? I don't really think so, but the most impressive blogs I've seen and bothered to read more than the first few entries or so, are much more graphically involved than mine. Does that just reflect a certain DIY computer savviness that I don't posess, or does it mean something more about how those people (rather than say, the average blog or livejournal user who is content with the templates and posting mechanisms given) incorporate their blogs as part of who they are? I guess I'm wondering because I've heard of people talking about their blogs like a house... is the graphical interface part of the outside or the inside of the house? What part is the text?

Also, as I've read more 'critical' essays, or people's writing about blogs (because it can be done, contrary to my own experience) I've noticed that the people who write about it get defensive about what 'normal people' like mainstream journalist people, say about blogs and blogging because they don't know anything about it because they've never done it. I don't know how well that holds up... just because you haven't ever made a film doesn't mean that you can't say anything intelligent about movies. But I also kind of get the point because I don't think I really could have known what my project could/would be about before I started actively reading blogs, reading about blogs AND blogging at once. Are filmmakers better film critics? I guess criticism and being a critic aren't really the same thing, but you know what I mean.

Derrida Paper

for reference to yesterday's post, the Derrida paper I wrote for pat day's lit crit class (once I figure out how to host attachments, I'll put it there, but for now... at least it takes up space.

Facing the Infinite Abyss

It’s 4:00 in the morning and I’m writing a paper. I have been in A-level of Mudd library for 20 hours, not including breaks for meals and cigarettes, yet I can still barely remember what the world is like outside my carrel. I have to hand it up in five hours — five measly hours to hone my little argument, so that it can be a drop in the sea of criticism. I am a critic.

This paper is not merely the culmination of my work in this particular course throughout the semester, or the pinnacle of my college career, but the singular action that all other actions of my life have led to. Everything up to this point, everything I’ve ever been, everything I’ve ever done, everything that has ever happened to me, has been such that at this moment, I would be writing this paper. I can’t remember what there was before — at this moment, being is encompassed in A-level, existence in my paper. It has taken over the vastness of the universe and become all that there is. Writing this paper is the only thing that I will ever do.
However, I am somehow vaguely aware that the deadline is imminent. I work steadily until 8:30 a.m., at which an invisible force wills me to stop. I give it one more read-through, print it out, and gather my things. I hurriedly leave the library for Rice, and presently I reach my professor’s office. I take this document, these pieces of paper that I have poured over for weeks, this text that is all that I ever was or ever will be, and I slip it under the door. I’m done; it’s over. And yet… life goes on. I walk outside and am reborn, having glimpsed into the infinite abyss of the process of reading.

Is this the best that can be done in the face of the infinite? Jacques Derrida, post-structuralist and the father of deconstructionism, posits his methodology for the way we ought to read, and for the way to garner meaning from text, as a project embedded in the infinity of the text. “There is too much, more than one can say.” (Derrida, Structure 12) The process of deconstruction — of reading, taking the book apart, writing, re-reading, and deconstructing again — is never-ending. But this isn’t how I’ve been taught to read, or have understood reading, because this is not how I understand the state of my existence. There is only so much time in the day to do the reading, to write the paper, to revise it, to take the courses, to be in college, to be alive. How are we, as finite beings, to interact with Derrida’s infinite project if we know that at some point it will be over and we’ll have to turn in the paper?

The process by which I can begin to engage with this question starts with processing and entering into the realm of Derrida’s methodology concerning the infinite text. Derrida’s conclusion of infinite reading begins after the project of structuralism reveals its own absence of a ‘center.’ The center has always been thought to be unique, because while it governs and dictates the form of the structure (thus being at it’s center) it exists outside it, and cannot be governed by the structure. (Derrida Structure 3) Additionally, in the evolution of a structuralist way of interpreting text, the center has always been thought to be “the determination of Being as presence in all senses of the word.” (4) In my understanding of Derrida’s procedure, this harks back to the question of finding truth in literature that has plagued humanity since Plato’s day. The center is where the truth of literature lies. Since there is no center, everything said about text, or structures in general, is participating in discourse: “a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified is never absolutely present outside a system of difference.” (4) Without a central signifier to dictate the rest of the structure, other significations are offered up as the crux by which a structure can be maintained, as substitutions for the center. (13) As such, many significations can be substituted, or supplemented, as the center for any structure, making them mobile in their construction of meaning.

At this point, the project of deconstruction — of questioning and tearing down structures by reading — becomes all the more vast because of the increase of structures, before the examination of the pretense of the possibility of the totality of text is even introduced. This is where all hope of finite deconstruction is lost. In Derrida’s project, totalization— the idea of the total, complete analysis; that there is a point at which there wouldn’t be any more to say — does not happen precisely because the absence of the a grounding point (the center) in the construction of language (as it is a structure) causes the nature of it as a finite thing to “exclude totalization” (12) thereby making it irrelevant if a text does in fact, have a finite empirical value in terms of words in it, because each word in every text is an unplottable signifier with an infinite proliferation of meaning. So, even if the production of texts were to cease right now, the process of deconstructing just one would still be an infinite task. The text is infinite.
If deconstruction is a process of infinite reading, and the point of deconstruction is to bring forth the possibility of meaning, it follows that deconstruction leads to the infinite proliferation of meaning. In the short story, ‘The Library of Babel’ by Borges, such an infinitely textual world is conceived, although the leap from this state to one of infinite meaning seems to fall short, because all of the people in this world are still trying to pin it down to one meaning, so to speak. (Except for the ones who claim “the books signify nothing in themselves,” and oppose the possibility of finding meaning in them at all.) The idea of totality is introduced as well: numerically, if there are only so many figures of which a book may consist in a closed form, and there are no two identical books, it follows that there are only so many combinations that can exist: thus arriving at a vast, yet finite number. However, the Narrator follows the route of Derrida’s infinitude in claiming that the vast library is infinite, though the books in it are finite: the library is actually a cyclical structure, and this discovery might be made by an “eternal traveler.”

How would our process of reading be different if there were no due dates? When would the paper, in its capacity as a reading of a text, be finished? There does not seem to be an answer for this question from Derrida, which is the point: one would never be finished. Derrida talks about this in his assertion that, “the idea of the book, which always refers to a natural totality, is profoundly alien to the sense of writing.” (Grammatology 605) Writing is not meant to happen in a closed form, as in books or essays. Writing is naturally meant to be an encounter with “the divine inscription” (Grammatology 604), which will encounter the presence of the inevitably absent origin, and result in the break with any need for truth in order to revel in the “joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault.” (Structure 15). This play must then be inherently infinite, which then calls the act of writing itself into this never-ending process, before looking at it as a form of textual response is even part of the equation, stretching the parameters of the process even more. Any textual engagement, either in creation of new texts or response to existing ones, enters into the dimension of the infinite.

But how are we, as admittedly and in fact finite beings to comprehend the scope of this project? Derrida does not completely ignore this factor of time insofar as the past nature of the action of reading and comprehension up to now is important in the way in which his new methodology of reading has developed. He examines how we have thought about the relations between signs and signification, being and presence, meaning and truth, throughout the collective past of humanity in the whole first part of Structure, Sign and Play, which I touched on earlier. Every historical step of the ideological structure of reading is accounted for in order to explain where we are in the process now. In Of Grammatology, the gradual movement from language to writing is examined in terms of its inevitability, rather than in terms of historical contingency. “Their movement was absolutely necessary, with a necessity which cannot be judged by any other tribunal.” (593) So while the movement of these concepts has happened, thereby affecting our understanding of them, they have not moved one way or the other because of our influence on them. No matter what we think about the sign, it will continue to move toward meaninglessness. It is the evolution of thought without the necessary condition of cause and effect. This is how the idea of the future presents itself in Derrida’s project, in that the evolution continues. There is a way that things were, which is different than how they are now, which is different than how they will be. “It is therefore as if what we call language could have been in its origin and in its end only a moment…an aspect, a species of writing…[T]his death of the book undoubtedly announces… nothing but a death of speech…and a new mutation in the history of writing.” (Grammatology 594) We are on the verge of a new moment, catching mere “glimpses” of the thing to come for our understanding of interpretation, reading, and writing. The coming moment when there will be no more due dates, and the infinite project will begin, in terms of the way that we interact with literature and texts. The moment when we will get to the place where we don’t know where we are going.

But what do I do right now? It seems absurd to attempt to answer this question if I want to be in the place where I don’t know where I’m going. I cannot even conceive of what the coming of the new moment would bring. What would the new writing look like without pages and books binding it? It seems as though nobody else does either, and that we are all at an impasse. Derrida’s writings were published 50 years ago, and there has been no systematic educational revolution to abolish the notion of being “done” with a book — there is still the progression, the reading list, due dates, semesters. His own essays are read, pondered, talked about, commented on, and eventually cleared away to make room for something new to read. What else can we do other than keep going with what we’ve been doing?

My only hope, as I attempt to grapple with these inconceivable formations of infinity in the context of reading, is to attempt to remain in play, though I still want to be able to live in the world. I am not sure if this is possible. I will try to play, to allow malleability, to let myself feel overwhelmed by a text, to get swept up by it and be in it while it deconstructs, and let myself be deconstructed. To that affect, I will keep thinking about this new reading, even though we have “finished the tour de France and are moving on to the Americans,” in class, and I will try to keep writing this paper, even though right now it’s done.

Mechanical Production

I told my class about how I don't know what to do about this class, or my final project. They said that I should just think of something and go for it... and quit thinking about it. Some suggested writing an epilogue for the blog, and then it would be the end. Then I worked on the documentary project all week and didn't think about it at all, really, except the usual guilt about not knowing what to write about, or what to say...

In terms of a "final product," I was thinking it might be good to write an epilogue, but that I still feel like saying that I'm done with it, especially in the form of the blog, would be really weird, and not seem quite right to do in the grand scheme of blogging. Two alternatives presented themselves:

1. I write an epilogue, wait a few days, print out the thing (?) to give to my professor, and delete the blog from the internet OR

2. Write some sort of langish something to go on here, about... things, and then not delete it and it would become my blog. Or at least it wouldn't be disguised as being "finished". Who knows, maybe it would become my forever blog/ intellectual engagement forum forthwith considering my impending graduation from college.

I wouldn't want option #2 to become a cop-out for not doing something to at least mark the end of the semester and how far I got with it up to that point. It still seems somehow counterintuitive and wrong to not have something more. I somehow doubt that the last thing I do would be the only part of this whole business that would guaranteed be read by my professor. On the other hand, I do not want to write a formal paper because:
a. I still don't know what such a paper would look like or how it would be possible for me to figure that out and write it by the time it would have to be due.
b. This whole experience has been somewhat less than "academic" for me in the traditional paper-writing sense as it has been an experience and an experiment in the modes of academic thinking, and what happens when it becomes really hard to read something in the academic way that I am used to with the things that I already know about text.

This project isn't particularly academically rigorous. I want to own that, and not pretend like it was by writing a paper that would basically end up looking like all the other papers I've ever written, like a paper factory.

So I will write something on my blog, and my blog will have been my project, and maybe, if I take the leap will continue to be my project... it will be my foray into Derrida's infinite writing project. Like in the paper I wrote last semester, for Literary theory.

Justin.tv

Has anyone else seen this? I heard about it from a friend, it’s this guy who wears a camera on his head and has it streamed live onto the internet. I haven’t watched a lot of it, because it seems really boring (the two times I watched he was out at a bar not talking to anyone and another time I watched he was at a desk at work, just doing some shit on the computer,) but I think the concept is really interesting. I cannot imagine anyone wanting to watch live streaming video of my life on the internet, in addition to which, hello, he didn’t think it up. Didn’t he see the movie EdTV? Except I still watched some of it and think it’s interesting that he even did it. I wonder if he wears the camera when he has sex and goes to the bathroom? Or when he does other embarrassing/ gross things that everyone does but never talks about and the only person who knows they do such things are maybe their significant other and their dog, but you still know that everyone does it, or something like it. Like picking at dead foot skin. Or OCD things like separating your t-shirts in your drawer into categories like collared/ not collared, text/ no text/ v-neck/ crew neck, etc. Not that I do either of those things either… I’m just giving some examples. I’m taking a documentary production class right now, and it made me think of that. Except documentaries are supposed to have a story, or something. Some kind of structure, and this thing is completely unfiltered.

What was I thinking?

I wonder why I have such a hard time writing on this thing. It is an interesting situation to have found myself in, to be trying to look at something that I thought I ought to know what to say about it before I even said it. What I mean to say is, though I don’t often know what my thesis is, I know how the paper is supposed to “look” by the time I turn it in. You have arguments and counter arguments and citations and criticism, and close reading and maybe some self-evaluation or critique. And I thought this would be a similar kind of exercise, and that at the end, I would be able to write a really good paper about it. I’m an English major. That’s what I’m supposed to know how to do. But here it is, three weeks til something is due, and at this point I don’t even know what paper I could write. I guess I have some books, and some scholarly articles, and some blogs, and this experience of not being able to write about them that I could then turn around and write about (?)…

I keep assuming and telling myself that I need to write a paper or something at the end, because I need to have a product, that is something more than rambling, nonsense, run-on sentences I’ve been infrequently posting on the internet. On my blog that no one reads. But after all that, it seems like the only reason that I would write a paper is because I can’t think of anything else. I am defeated by the post-sturcutralist postmodernist internet textual experience, and I must recede back into the ways of the academy and write an analytical, scholarly paper about it because that is all I know. That, and this blog. This blog writing that I have been slowly more able to do as I realize that in order to say anything about it I might end up saying something stupid... yet still not wanting to say something stupid. And not wanting it to be one of the stupid blogs that are only good for their engagement with textual space rather than their writing, because the writing is bad. It all comes back to the experience of shame and self-consciousness:
I don’t want the blog to be uninteresting or unintelligent.
I don’t want to be a miserable failure of an English major.
I don’t want my inability to write coherently and authoritatively about the on-line personal blogs to really be because I am lazy or stupid or not getting something.

What was I thinking? I keep going back and forth about feeling like a failure. I feel like I am just contributing to the fire hose of text that is coming out of the blogosphere. I don’t want to think that that is the only thing to be done with this project until I try something else. But why don’t I want that to be? Why is this kind of writing so much lower to me in responding to these things than writing a paper?

Twingly Screensaver- Visualizing Global Blog Activity

This is something I heard about, that I unfortunately cannot download because it is only for PCs. I am planning on coercing someone into letting me download it onto their computer to see what it looks like in real time. This is the description of the screensaver from the makers:
"Twingly screensaver is visualizing the global blog activity in real time. Forget RSS readers where you see only what you're interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen."- Primelabs

Somehow I think this would be much more compelling to watch if it were live, than something like the "updated blogs" rolling list on blogger, or the recently update livejournal function. I don't quite know what to make of it yet, but thought I should share.

Hmmm... repetition?

I don't want to say the same thing over and over. Its hard to know what I write about or already wrote about sometimes because I don't plan it in advance, and when I'm posting I can't really see more than 10 lines of what I've written. Which seems like a lot, but isn't really. It is definitely enough to lose yourself, and what you meant to say.

I was talking to someone else about this project, and the problem of the hugeness and volume of the words that I was/ am trying to sift through, and he was talking about how he thinks of blogs, and because there are so many, they cannot be unique, so people begin to write in tropes. This makes the blogs repeat themselves in many contexts. Or become replicates. So the problem of the sheer volume goes away in the cookie-cutter mentality (you've looked at one, you've looked at them all, and you don't have to read that many to know what they're "like" because they're all the same.) I thought about it for awhile, and I couldn't decide if it made me feel better, or worse. Perhaps this problem of reading I've been having isn't as much of a problem as I thought: if they're all the same, then it doesn't matter if you read them all or not, and close reading doesn't apply in this case.

But really, in the end you still have to read them all by themselves because they all exist by themselves. Its almost like Borges's library. In the story, there are an infinite number of books, and two books could be almost exactly the same, save one or two letters... and that would make a whole new book. So though it might not be about reading them all, but that many exist, and you can't get around that. They take up that much space. That seems like an important feature, that (whether or not they are all good writing) they all still exist somewhere. I guess I mean that the idea that they are all the same just doesn't help me out a lot in not feeling overwhelemed by them, because how can you know anything about them until you've read a lot of them. But how do you do that without them becoming obsolete, or the number of them doubling, or being able to keep up? I guess the assumption that they become similar still rests on some level of mastery, which is the thing I'm struggling with. It becomes a circular argument for me... but maybe that's just me.

With a twist...

I've been thinking more about the confession I made last week. That I'm not sure that I really know what I'm talking about, or if I'm thinking about blogging in a new way, or in an interesting way, or in a different way than I had before. I think that the urge to post it (in addition to wanting to think more about the confession, and what it means) really comes down to the fact that, because of my inability to really wrap my mind around what it is I am actually talking about, I feel a deep sense of shame. I am ashamed.

I am an English major, and this is my senior capstone project. I am graduating in less than two months. I didn't do honors, and I am not a remarkable student. But this thing, this project I have been undertaking, was supposed to be this thing that I would do that would be my thing, the thing I did, the thing that all the previous semesters lead up to. I would become an expert of the blog, the online diary: in the end, I would be able to say something brilliant, or at least well-informed and interesting, about it. It would be my subject and my method, and through this, I would validate my education. I had faith when I first began, but my "progress," in my mind, quickly ground to a shuddering halt. Before I knew it, it was midterms week... and I was completely overwhelmed. I had been looking at things for weeks: blogs, online forums, books, articles... and still didn't even know where to begin. I feebly posted when I could muster the courage, but there was too much, and I could produce nothing. I had barely touched the tip of the iceberg, but it was still like a power surge that makes the lights go out. I short circuited.

But I think I want to twist this around, and instead of lying defeated, look at what it means to feel this way about a text. What are you supposed to do when something flattens you like that, especially in a context where the percieved point of the whole endeavor is some level of mastery of the thing that flattened you? I'm a fucking English major. I am supposed to know how to read really well, and then be able to say things about the text I read. I am supposed to be able to talk about "the text" as a thing in and of itself, and the possibilities of the meaning of the thing that it is or might be or could become. I am supposed to be able to do all these things, but I think that a running theme in my posts so far is that this thing kind of exists outside/ beyond/ not with the kind of kinds of texts I'm used to looking at. In fact, I'm not even sure anymore if I want to even call this thing a "text." Maybe the blog as thing is what people meant when they talked about the "death of the author" and the disembodied text. But really if I'm being honest, it's been a little hard for me to actually think of books this way so far. I mean, if the idea had caught on, then people wouldn't care who the author was anymore, would they? But they still do, at least with books. This medium, this blog thing: not so much. I remember hearing about this one personal blog some woman was writing, just about the kind of blog I've been trying to look at: things about her life, her interactions, her thoughts and anecdotes. It got really popular because it was really funny, and THEN everyone found out that it was a man, who had comepletely made up everything and the blog was kind of like a living novel for awhile, and then he got a book deal... I don't remember. I also don't know if this tale is actually true, but it is true enough in its meaning, in that it didn't matter who the man was until he wanted to write the book. The book has legitimacy- its a scandal when someone isn't who they say they are in print. Apparently not always the case with the blog.

Anyway, what I mean is that I am beginning to think of this project that I am doing in a new way, so as to not be flattened by this thing I cannot master. I want to think more about describing this thing, how it functions differently than a book, how it functions differently than a text, and what that means for how we can read it. I want to look more closely at the ways that it takes up spaces and time, and just kind of describe it, and see how it looks. I'm still interested in how this affects memory/ personal texts specifically, but I think I was sort of taking a lot of this stuff for granted, in terms of looking at how these things would effect the personal memory aspect of blogging. To get to that, I think I need to look more closely at the thing in a theoretical way, rather than looking toward the blogs themselves for answers.

Little help

I haven't posted in awhile. Three weeks, to be exact. Some of that I can excuse away, chalking it up to midterms and spring break. But mostly its been a combination of laziness and a lack of confidence that this project is going the way that I want it to, without knowing the way I really want it to go or how to make it be that way. I don't know that what I've been doing or saying has been making me think any differently about this subject since I started writing about it. I don't know if what I've been doing has been interesting. I'm starting to lose faith in my ability to say anything new about this, and search for resources effectively, and actually make something out of all of this that would make sense or be useful or interesting in any way.



I was debating about whether or not to post about this because it seems too confessional/ personal/ not really relevant to what I'm "trying to do," but then I decided that it was entirely appropriate. In addition to wanting to experiment with the kind of writing I'm looking at, I think it would be ridiculous for me to propose talking about personal blogs and online diaries without thinking about the confession. And hey, I'm supposed to sort of bring my self-conciousness about things into this directly, right? What better way than to confess that I don't know if I know at all what I'm doing? Am I supposed to fake it? It seems like this particular forum (as in, my English class) has been encouraging me not to, and in truth, part of me feels like I've faked my way through most of college anyway. So in this, my last huzzah, in conjunction with an effort to better understand the nature of the on-line blog confession, I will tell my fake internet non-audience that I'm not entirely sure what it is I'm doing here, commanding your attention to read something I don't know is interesting.

Plus, since my search for primary texts (actual, real-life blogs) seems more and more daunting and pointless every time I do it simply because there are so many out there, I've started to wonder if the text (as in the content) is really as interesting to me as the idea or the theory behind these internet texts. But, the confessional quality of some internet diaries is definitely content-oriented, so I decided to roll with it and see where it takes me. I wonder why some journals take on this quality while others do not, yet they are all talking about private or at least personal matters. I think part of it has to do with taking advantage of the anonymity— (hello, Oberlin Confessional) and having a sort of weird relationship with your "audience." That's the one reason why my confession just now doesn't really function in the same way as others I've read. I presume that almost everyone who might be (maybe... I am still not sure that anyone is actually) reading this, has some reason to do so, is either in my class, or I've talked to about it in some way, so my confessing to my fabricated audience is telling something to people who in some sense, know who I am. Some of the blogs I've read, this is not always the case. For my own 16-year-old blogging experience, the confessions I made were meant for people who didn't know me to read. People I wouldn't get in trouble with. The other thing about confessions is that maybe it makes one seem more truthful, or authentic in some way. In the revealing, maybe there is truth. But then I don't know if I want to open up that can of worms... wrapped up in truth in texts, and the point of which, nature, mediation of such, the MEANING, etc. I'm not quite sure I want to go down that road, for fear it is a tangent.

Zoe Trope

I was looking at the Oberlin LiveJournal Community while I was paroosing the LiveJournal website for things to read (after stumbling on some random high schooler's blog all about food and what she ate, then looking at her profile and realizing she was a part of the online anorexic/ bulimic/ eating disorder pride community network, clicking away in saddened horror searching for something more bengin... my own home College) and zoe_trope had posted something.

Now, Zoe Trope is a psudonym, but this person occupies this kind of interesting space to me/ for me that I'm not sure how or if is replicated in precisely the same way by anyone else, because I've never come in contact with another memoirist. As it says on her profile, she published a memoir of her freshman year of high school when she was 16, written when she was 14 (so says the publisher) called Please Don't Kill The Freshmen. I've never read the memoir. I also don't know how long she's kept a livejournal, but I as someone who isn't a member of the site and/or one of her friends, I can't look at anything she's posted since about ohh, three months ago or something. I'm pretty sure she kept one before that, since I remember a bunch of people (freshman or sophomore year) saying that Zoe Trope was at school here and they knew that because it said on her livejournal, and I can see something like archives but I can't read them.

The interesting thing about all this, to me, is the difference between a bound publication and the seeming endlessness of a LiveJournal, even though I am exhibit A that blogs can end... yet they still (mostly always) exist with the possibility of being posted on again. How would a memoir function differently as a remediation of self-memory than a livejournal? Both are public, and (for Zoe) both are anonymous, yet one is boundless and publicly consumable/ editable/ writable in a sense with comments, and one is a book with borders and no hyperlinks. Does either become less anonymous because I know who she is (in real life) and can put a face to the words? How does knowing the person posting affect the blog? Some people's blogs do get really popular, just from being interesting, compelling writers, but most of the ones I'm looking at by clicking around completely randomly don't seem to be written exactly for me... they talk to their friends, or purposely are trying to reach out to people who aren't their friends, and the audience is for specific people (who either know them or don't). When the anonymity goes away, does the text change, in either form? What about memoirs of people who are famous that I don't know... might they as well be anonymous? I'm not sure how much deeper I want to go with that, considering this is supposed to be about the uniqueness of the blogging medium as a form of remediated memory. But seeing Zoe Trope's livejournal got me thinking about it, at least.

an article and my shame

I read this article from New York Magazine all about how our generation has different ideas about privacy and memory preservation, as evidenced by our online lives. Blogs, livejournals, facebook, myspace, flickr... all of these document and record our everyday lives, PLUS they are all online forever. In this spirit, I'd like to direct you to my now basically defunct, but still existing, once regularly updated blog, www.asleeponcloud9.blogspot.com.

In a way I am embarassed by it, but somehow unable to delete it. One of the people interviewed in the article had no such shame, claiming that it was interesting for her to see what she was like back then, and to see her grow and change right before her eyes on screen. But I wonder if it is really me in there. I remember starting that blog because a bunch of my other far-away camp friends had them, and I wanted to be able to communicate with them without sending those huge mass e-mails. But it was still a little more to me than that... I could publicly bitch about my mom, problems at school, or whatever I wanted, without thinking they would ever find it in the annals of the internet. It was somehow subversive, and I was getting away with something. I don't think it was ever really widely read, or extensively commented on, and I never had people I only knew from my being online this way. Still, I wonder if its really me on there, or something else.

Anyway, the article was interesting, even if only insofar as it was something that I've been thinking about reflected back to me through mainstream media. When I was thinking about what I would do for my project, social networking sites did cross my mind as memory keeper-self-projection online objects I could look at, but in general are less textual and not as visually interesting or varied. Even if different stuff is on your facebook profile, everyone's is basically the same because of the format, while blogs and online journals are much more varied, I find.

a little more on danah boyd...

I finished reading the rest of danah boyd's paper. After re-contextualizing what it means to "blog" (and understanding it as a medium rather than a genre, as I understood) she goes on to talk about the blogging medium blurs "accepted distinctions such as between orality and textuality, corporeality and spatiality, private and public."

The orality and textuality bit is interesting mostly because I've been thinking of blogs as a textual medium because they involve reading and writing, but that they may be more about "speaking" in a spatial and performative way. Can a text perform?

But, the thing I found most interesting for this project is the blurring between public and private spaces... She ends up saying that it is blurred because of the various ways people think about their blogs, and what a blog is to a person: is it an expression of themselves, or is it a performance in the body of their self? Is there a difference? Whatever it is, it is already mediated through language, but her claim that perhaps the blog can function as an extention of the blogger's body because they see the blog as them she keeps saying, doesn't seem to me to be the only conclusion one can make from that. However, she does pose all these possibilities in terms of blog space: a blogger's blog is their blog, like an extension of their body, but is also something they can invite other people to take a part in sort of like a house. A blog itself as a personal space, but one in which other people can interact. Then, the blogosphere acts as a different kind of space since it holds all the houses... does it function as the truly "public" space? How can that work? What does such a space look like?

Bodies or houses: which is more private, and which can hold more potential for performance? In diary blogs, in personal blogs, are we simultaneously inviting people over (like asking your mom to read it instead of calling you all the time) and putting out a strategicially clothed and airbrushed revealing of the body? I want both of these concepts to work simultaneously and I don't know if that's how it works... is the "self" more obscured in the house of the blog where there is this whole structure of the space protecting and keeping the individual, or is the self more obscured (or mediated) when the blog is a space like a body, but you're only showing certian parts... blog as body seems really weird, but that is how they seem to function as they move within the blogosphere even if that doesn't seem to be the case in terms of how people read them.

things I've read.

When I started this project, I was going to try to post almost every day. So far I am doing terribly. I will go forward from this point with renewed vigor or something. I will actively try to not be so self-conscious and post even when I'm not at all sure what to say. Because maybe then I will think of something to say. Even if it is two sentences.

Now. I think danah boyd might be my new hero. I am in the middle of one of her papers and it is blowing my mind. Then I googled her, read about her on Wikipedia, and found her blog, and have determined from our short acquaintance that she is really neat and knows a lot of shit. Being one of the people who has been with blogging from the beginning gives her a really interesting and formulated perspective, in addition to her initially coming to it from a computer science perspective... and I really don't know a lot about the technology side of it at all (as evident by this completely boring, really sparse looking blog)... is all really interesting to me. For right now, I just want to talk about my initial reactions to it, especially considering I haven't finished reading it yet.

Initially the most interesting (and pertinent) thing about this essay (for me) is the definition of the medium part. I guess I understand how the definition and purpose of a new medium can be hard to navigate, and it doesn't really make sense to me that people would lump 'blogs' all together as producing one kind of text (like a diary), because there are blogs about everything... but I think part of it has to do with defining what the blog is for yourself. On her personal blog, she categorizes and tags her own posts under certain things: I registered my blog on Technorati in a certain way (tagging it under "personal" and "diary" mostly because that is what it is about, more than what it is, although perhaps this distinction is sort of false... I don't consider this particularly a venue of personal expression, but it is definitely a little personal... anyway) because you want to divide things into genres. The problem with genre is not really only a factor for blogs, as I've had experiences in classes discussing genre in other narrative mediums: films, television, literature, etc... but perhaps because a blog is a new kind of narrative media, the content and the medium is getting confused. Cinema, I think, went through something sort of similar: initially, cinema was equated with something that essentially 'documented' what was in front of it... and as people's understanding and exploitation of the medium became more savvy, the understanding of what cinema was changed. Just look at the surrealists. I guess I see blogs as a primarily narrative medium because it seems like a lot of people agree that a distinguishing feature of a blog versus another sort of webpage is that blogs are presented in reverse chronological order, which I think might warrant at least a projection of a narrative rather than complete randomness... but I'm not sure how well I've developed this idea. In general though, because of the reverse chronological order thing, people generally tend to build on things they've said before at least a little bit, which signals some kind of narrative to me. But I guess literature and cinema haven't been totally narrative (again, the surrealists) so maybe that doesn't really work either.

Basically I wanted to talk about that because I am compartmentalizing and giving genre to the kinds of blogs I want to look at: the personal kind. The kind that people write things about themselves, their day-to-day existence, their to-do lists, their photos, their gripes about their families, their writing about everything and nothing. I don't really want to look at blogs that are like this: ones that are writing about something specific and not really personal at the fore. The ones about music, television, politics, books, blogging, youtube, sports, whatever... I don't want to look at those. Even though they are (in some way) a representation of the self. I want to look at ones that are self-consciously self representational. I feel a little guilty making cleavages this way and forcing genre, especially since in most of the class discussions I've been involved in have determined that genre is really limiting and not really intrinsic to texts at all... on the other hand I have to write a paper or do something more codified about all this stuff by the end of the semester and the internet is way too big to be looking at everything all the time (in the manner of the oft-updated blog) especially when I am totally new to this medium. So maybe I will figure out a way to address that, but for right now I am comfortable with being aware that I am only looking at one kind of blog, which doesn't represent all blogs or the medium of blogging, but still looking at what the medium does to this one kind of genre. If that makes sense.

That might just be totally tangential to what she's saying in her paper, but it is making me think of all kinds of cool things, and I am definitely totally digging it.

Tentative beginnings...

I think that I don't really understand the vastness of the internet. I can get lost for hours in things current: NYTimes, YouTube, and Wikipedia, but for the last few days I've been getting lost in things archived and forgotten, truely buried in hyperspace. Going through webrings for on-line diarists whose lists of pages have maybe one or two actively updating writers, and wading through heaps and heaps of diaries and personal blogs left unupdated since 2003 (which for all intents and purposes, in the immediacy of this medium, was eons ago). And yet the internet can hold it all... all the webpages every kid ever made for school, every outdated government information site, every defunct diarist page. How might this affect my interest in the immediacy of this project? Should it matter if the webpages are being updated are not? Even if they aren't, there's no reason to think that they're any less valid in terms of being mediated reflections of a person, or their memory, or something. However, within this space of memory, it seems as though a paper diary, being physical, brings with it the idea of a boundary for this reflection. Do forgotten blogs function in the same way, because it looks like the writer has effectively finished with them? Maybe the appeal of updating has to do with not just immediacy of thought, and my response to that, but also the idea of boundlessness. Does stopping writing mean that memories stop?

There is something vaguely intriguing about it, much like walking through a graveyard or the "really old" section with the libraries forgotten texts: never really forgotten (they are there to be found after all, aren't they?) but outdated nonetheless. However, this isn't really exactly my purpose: I don't want this to turn into a psychological study of WHY people write in weblogs, so much as looking at a bigger picture of why people create mediated memory, and if the publicity of the internet affects that. However, I have read several different people talking about why they took themselves on the internet, and it also seems like many of them don't even know. Next time I look for things I'll try to cut and paste some quotes and link it or something. But for me that means I don't want to find out their reasons necessarily, so much as I want to explore a kind of "cultural reason" and the implications of that. I'm not sure if that makes any sense.

I read a couple of good articles about the phenomenon of web posting in newspaper articles on the net from 2000. But after a weekend of hunting around like this, I'm starting to feel that I need more structure than just limiting the amount of time I spend clicking around. I was looking at the webrings thinking that maybe I could post on someone's livejournal or whatever, alerting people to the presence of this project. But now I'm not sure if that's the audience I'm looking for, if it isn't so much about their psychology. I'm also discouraged from asking anyone to read it with so little to say or direction to follow. I also found out about one book written on the subject(ish) but it's in French and hasn't been translated yet. I'm thinking about making a reference appointment to see who has written about this stuff already, and what they had to say. Maybe that will jumpstart some ideas.

Resource hunting

I've kind of been wondering about how to go about starting the practical business of reading as the internet is such a vast and craziliy huge thing. I was told to just jump in and start reading some blogs, but I thought it might be helpful in the long run to look at what sort of stuff is already out there about blogging, so I turned to my favorite source, Wikipedia. Unluckily for me, this did not serve too well to narrow things down, but did give me some background and sites that might be helpful, like

Technorati - for finding blogs to look at by searching, as opposed to randomly clicking around for hours and hours.
Diarist.net- a site that seems sort of outdated/ old, but might serve well for historical findings and catalyst for finding other, similar, newer message board type things that people actually still use.
Open Diary History Project - something I may be able to use to make contact with the open diary world, or at least learn more about why people actually started doing this (in a personal way, rather than in a theoretical, pomo way).
(Side note: Do I have to explain what things are if they are hyperlinks? I mean, I guess I just don't expect that people will click on every single one just because I put them there, so I feel compelled to warn people what they are getting into.)

It seems as though blogging as a media has sort of boomed like nuts over the last 3-4 years as a media outlet, and had more of a heyday in terms of the sort of personal blog thing that I am interested in around 2000 (what with LiveJournal, Xanga, and Blogger, of course). I mean, people obviously still write personal blogs, but today the general area of focus when it comes to blogs, blogging and bloggers seems to be on them in terms of how they interact with mainstream media and as advocacy journalism, proliferation of political commentary, and the personal publishing aspect. So it seems that I am a little late in terms of what is fashionable at this particular moment, (just like with cyberpunk... dang) but since things on the internet apparently never die (or at least they don't if they existed before about 2000) I don't think I'll have a problem finding a lot of stuff to look at. How I will sift through it all... any suggestions?

Also, I've been doing my personal best to tell everyone I know that this exists, in order to fully embrace this public medium and make it as much a collaborative text as anything else out there on the internet. I think I may even resort to putting it up on facebook, but at this point I think I will stop short of e-mailing the link to literally everyone I know. Though it has just begun, please tell other people you might know about it, in case it might be interesting.

Proposal

This is my proposal for this project, as I was told to write one for my professor. It seems as good a way as any to state my intentions:

Journal writing, and writing in diaries, isn’t anything new. People have been keeping personal records of their own impressions of the world in which they live as well as the trials of their own lives since the dawn of modern civilization. Such records take on the form of written words on paper, as an object of textually mediated self-memory. I’m interested in looking at what it means to mediate the self and the experience of memory in this textual way, especially when looking at what happens to this textual remediation when it exists in the digital space of the internet in the form of personal blogs and online diaries.

Paper diaries and journals are intrinsically private spaces. They are our personal records, often buried in the piles of papers that accumulate throughout our lives, shut away in the annals of the crawl-space for the grandkids to stumble upon one day, while the exceptional ones become thrust into the public eye and published, or otherwise morph into memoirs or autobiographies, all in the guise of revealing what a person was “really” like. Do these memory-texts really serve this function, or do they reveal something else, and if so, what? In this way, I am also interested in exploring how issues of authorship and conceptions of “the self” (with regard to the post-structuralist theories of the death of the author and the imaginary self) when the text is written about oneself by oneself.

Blogs occupy a somewhat different memory space in terms of privacy, because they are not so much private as anonymous. Instead of being buried and lost in the attic, they get lost in hyperspace. They are part of a vast and largely public system, in which the proliferation of media, immediacy of accessibility and consumption are at the fore. How does this absence of privacy, compounded with the replacement of the personal nature of the diary to a more all-inclusive and perhaps universal nature of the blog publishing world, affect the functionality of the diary as a personal memory-keeper or remediation of the self?

I will explore these ideas through reading blogs and responding to them on this "meta-blog"— a blog about blogging. Rather than a personal record, it will serve as a record of my explorations and reflections about these issues. Making a blog seems like a good way to go about doing this because one learns best by doing, and while my subject matter may be different, I will have put the experience of blogging into practice in terms of the immediacy in the response to the things I read. Additionally, its public nature will serve to put forth and mediate my thought processes in a manner that I’ve never done before. Putting a form of that process out there for all to see will hopefully partially help serve the larger purpose of exploring my own self-consciousness through this project. Furthermore, it seems that the nature of my interest warrants a different kind of response in its linearity: right now I am interested in exploration, spontaneous interpretation, and the experience of the analytical process these questions provoke, which doesn’t seem to lend itself too much toward a linear trajectory or argument in the traditional sense. I plan to write a paper afterwards, which itself might be a reflection of this whole experiment, but I’m not too sure at this point as I am just starting the blog now. I’d like to supplement this project with secondary reading such as some technology theory as well as post-structuralist theory as it seems pertinent, but besides Lacan and Barthes, I’m not quite sure what would be good to read.



So that is basically what I am doing right now. If anyone has any suggestions of some criticism that might be good to read, please let me know.