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.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 13, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, March 11, 2007
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.
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.
Monday, March 5, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
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.
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.
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