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.