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 all the webpages every kid ever made for school, every outdated government information site, every defunct diarist page.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 but outdated nonetheless.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.