Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Proposal

This is my proposal for this project, as I was told to write one for my professor. It seems as good a way as any to state my intentions:

Journal writing, and writing in diaries, isn’t anything new. People have been keeping personal records of their own impressions of the world in which they live as well as the trials of their own lives since the dawn of modern civilization. Such records take on the form of written words on paper, as an object of textually mediated self-memory. I’m interested in looking at what it means to mediate the self and the experience of memory in this textual way, especially when looking at what happens to this textual remediation when it exists in the digital space of the internet in the form of personal blogs and online diaries.

Paper diaries and journals are intrinsically private spaces. They are our personal records, often buried in the piles of papers that accumulate throughout our lives, shut away in the annals of the crawl-space for the grandkids to stumble upon one day, while the exceptional ones become thrust into the public eye and published, or otherwise morph into memoirs or autobiographies, all in the guise of revealing what a person was “really” like. Do these memory-texts really serve this function, or do they reveal something else, and if so, what? In this way, I am also interested in exploring how issues of authorship and conceptions of “the self” (with regard to the post-structuralist theories of the death of the author and the imaginary self) when the text is written about oneself by oneself.

Blogs occupy a somewhat different memory space in terms of privacy, because they are not so much private as anonymous. Instead of being buried and lost in the attic, they get lost in hyperspace. They are part of a vast and largely public system, in which the proliferation of media, immediacy of accessibility and consumption are at the fore. How does this absence of privacy, compounded with the replacement of the personal nature of the diary to a more all-inclusive and perhaps universal nature of the blog publishing world, affect the functionality of the diary as a personal memory-keeper or remediation of the self?

I will explore these ideas through reading blogs and responding to them on this "meta-blog"— a blog about blogging. Rather than a personal record, it will serve as a record of my explorations and reflections about these issues. Making a blog seems like a good way to go about doing this because one learns best by doing, and while my subject matter may be different, I will have put the experience of blogging into practice in terms of the immediacy in the response to the things I read. Additionally, its public nature will serve to put forth and mediate my thought processes in a manner that I’ve never done before. Putting a form of that process out there for all to see will hopefully partially help serve the larger purpose of exploring my own self-consciousness through this project. Furthermore, it seems that the nature of my interest warrants a different kind of response in its linearity: right now I am interested in exploration, spontaneous interpretation, and the experience of the analytical process these questions provoke, which doesn’t seem to lend itself too much toward a linear trajectory or argument in the traditional sense. I plan to write a paper afterwards, which itself might be a reflection of this whole experiment, but I’m not too sure at this point as I am just starting the blog now. I’d like to supplement this project with secondary reading such as some technology theory as well as post-structuralist theory as it seems pertinent, but besides Lacan and Barthes, I’m not quite sure what would be good to read.



So that is basically what I am doing right now. If anyone has any suggestions of some criticism that might be good to read, please let me know.