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.