Sunday, April 29, 2007

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.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

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?

Sunday, April 22, 2007

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.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

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.

Monday, April 16, 2007

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.

Thursday, April 5, 2007

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.