The blogging genre
For many years, I have remained outside of the blogosphere, standing on the sidelines as others blog culture into existence. Briggie, JKJ, these have been the examples most personal to me. In the meantime, I would frequently start blogs on my own, writing about what was important to me; but, feeling that the content was too personal or meaningless, I subsequently made the blogs private or took them off the net. Eventually all of the posts from these blogs wound up on a single blog that I now keep as a private, web-based journal, Lusus Naturae. The blog still has some comments, vestiges of a once public day. I appreciate the opportunity to compile my thoughts online on a blog, even for private purposes.
I have gone back and forth about how to keep a journal using the digital resources. During the seventh and eight grade years of home schooling, I would type out my journal entries into a word processing program. Typing is an easy way to write, but the process lacked a degree of finality, a degree of tangibility that I desired. So, during my undergraduate, I focused most of my journal entry writing on handwritten entries. I have stacks of notebooks that hold the secrets of survival for the emotionally troubled college student. Writing it down just felt better than typing it out. Computer programs have been so transient in my life, it seems as thought what you write in one program will need to be saved into twenty new different programs over the course of a lifetime. What's more is that writing into a word processing program decreases the mobility of the journal entries. If I write it at my home PC, in order to add to the digital journal or review it is to (a) carry it on a storage disk or mobile drive, or (b) send it via internet. With either option, you must be sure that the computer that you open up elsewhere has the same software that you used to create the document.
Now, some people have solved this problem by keeping their digital journal on a laptop, a piece of hardware that they carry with them no matter where they go. I suppose that I should have been one of those people considering how important writing is for my emotional health; but, I have never been able to come to terms with spending the very large sum of money required to purchase such verbal mobility. That could be because electronics are expensive, or it could be because I don't have the capacity or the luxury to value my emotional health at such a high cost. So, in the meantime, I have written as I am able and in a way that makes me feel good: on notebooks and pieces of paper, wherever I am at, whatever I am doing. (So, in case you are keeping track, when I die, don't spend too much time looking at the harddrive of my computer. Focus on the boxes of notebooks and pieces of paper in my apartment, PA storage unit and my school office to find the pearls of wisdom really worth reading through and publishing posthumously).
Over the past four years since college, I have played with other ways of keeping track of my written thoughts digitally. One method that I have tried extensively is writing emails to myself. I wonder how emailing yourself compares to speaking to yourself. It seems that since I speak to myself enough, it is only write that I should email myself once in a while, to keep up a good friendship. The problem with emailing myself has been that of organization. I see my entire email account as a historical record of my doings (this is another place to really learn about me posthumously) and I plan to use it as the principle document when I go back to write some family histories. It will be a shame if the internet loses it all for me in the meantime.
Anyway, because my gmail account houses so much information, writing digital journal entries there relinquishes the importance of these entries to that of all the other information contained, which for me is not the case. I can create a folder for these items, but even this move is organizationally weak. I want to be able to read the journal as a unified whole, with easy movement between entries and powerful cataloging tools. Email does not allow one to access a document by date very easily. For example if you want to write 521 emails to a friend, the only way you can access the 267 email is by searching for emails to and from that person, or going to a folder that contains all of those and then viewing the list of emails 1-266 before you get to it, or going backwards, viewing emails 521-268. Either way, it is not a very quick process. I like using the email account as a place to keep journal entries because it is personal, private, and a place where I would usually go share thoughts. But, it is not organizationally friendly, and it also lacks the degree of finality that I seek.
I suppose the obvious question is, why didn't I go to a web-based journal service much earlier on? I've known about livejournal.com for years, and using just a limited degree of my powers of reasoning I would have been able to determine that online journal tools are available, if not abundant. I think my response would be that such sites are aesthetically poor, and the process lacks the power of consistency, the sense (and hopefully not the illusion) of permanence offered by blogs today. When I write a journal entry to a blog, the process of pushing the 'publish' button is equivalent in some way to writing out the entry in pen on paper. The words are there, set aside as finished.
In the meantime, keeping my own thoughts digitally, in private sphere, has allowed me to share somewhat less personal thoughts publicly with friends and family. Social association by social association, I have been connecting myself more through blogs. Once I determined that I would speak to myself online through a blog, I started a blog for my family to interact with each other over the long distances that separate us temporarily, a place where we can feel safe to share important and private things, as well as comfortable to say silly or nonsense things. After family, I created a blog for my classroom, where students and I can interact and have a real discussion in writing and not just in the classroom. Most online teaching and course supplemental aids have some sort of blogging option, but I opted to go with a mainstream blogging tool. Aesthetically it is more pleasing and functionally it is smoother. Also, it connects the classroom with real world tools and shows how communication you learn in your writing course is not just for the writing course. I don't know which social association I will next start a blog for, but in the meantime, I am appreciating the ways in which blogging supports my real life, corporeal associations.
Oh, and this blog? This counts as the place where I work through different ideas that are interesting, fun, and potentially worth brining to a larger audience one day, i.e., that means they might not be so great right now. It is a practice place. Also, I hope that one day it will be a place where people go to find something entertainingly engaging.
I have gone back and forth about how to keep a journal using the digital resources. During the seventh and eight grade years of home schooling, I would type out my journal entries into a word processing program. Typing is an easy way to write, but the process lacked a degree of finality, a degree of tangibility that I desired. So, during my undergraduate, I focused most of my journal entry writing on handwritten entries. I have stacks of notebooks that hold the secrets of survival for the emotionally troubled college student. Writing it down just felt better than typing it out. Computer programs have been so transient in my life, it seems as thought what you write in one program will need to be saved into twenty new different programs over the course of a lifetime. What's more is that writing into a word processing program decreases the mobility of the journal entries. If I write it at my home PC, in order to add to the digital journal or review it is to (a) carry it on a storage disk or mobile drive, or (b) send it via internet. With either option, you must be sure that the computer that you open up elsewhere has the same software that you used to create the document.
Now, some people have solved this problem by keeping their digital journal on a laptop, a piece of hardware that they carry with them no matter where they go. I suppose that I should have been one of those people considering how important writing is for my emotional health; but, I have never been able to come to terms with spending the very large sum of money required to purchase such verbal mobility. That could be because electronics are expensive, or it could be because I don't have the capacity or the luxury to value my emotional health at such a high cost. So, in the meantime, I have written as I am able and in a way that makes me feel good: on notebooks and pieces of paper, wherever I am at, whatever I am doing. (So, in case you are keeping track, when I die, don't spend too much time looking at the harddrive of my computer. Focus on the boxes of notebooks and pieces of paper in my apartment, PA storage unit and my school office to find the pearls of wisdom really worth reading through and publishing posthumously).
Over the past four years since college, I have played with other ways of keeping track of my written thoughts digitally. One method that I have tried extensively is writing emails to myself. I wonder how emailing yourself compares to speaking to yourself. It seems that since I speak to myself enough, it is only write that I should email myself once in a while, to keep up a good friendship. The problem with emailing myself has been that of organization. I see my entire email account as a historical record of my doings (this is another place to really learn about me posthumously) and I plan to use it as the principle document when I go back to write some family histories. It will be a shame if the internet loses it all for me in the meantime.
Anyway, because my gmail account houses so much information, writing digital journal entries there relinquishes the importance of these entries to that of all the other information contained, which for me is not the case. I can create a folder for these items, but even this move is organizationally weak. I want to be able to read the journal as a unified whole, with easy movement between entries and powerful cataloging tools. Email does not allow one to access a document by date very easily. For example if you want to write 521 emails to a friend, the only way you can access the 267 email is by searching for emails to and from that person, or going to a folder that contains all of those and then viewing the list of emails 1-266 before you get to it, or going backwards, viewing emails 521-268. Either way, it is not a very quick process. I like using the email account as a place to keep journal entries because it is personal, private, and a place where I would usually go share thoughts. But, it is not organizationally friendly, and it also lacks the degree of finality that I seek.
I suppose the obvious question is, why didn't I go to a web-based journal service much earlier on? I've known about livejournal.com for years, and using just a limited degree of my powers of reasoning I would have been able to determine that online journal tools are available, if not abundant. I think my response would be that such sites are aesthetically poor, and the process lacks the power of consistency, the sense (and hopefully not the illusion) of permanence offered by blogs today. When I write a journal entry to a blog, the process of pushing the 'publish' button is equivalent in some way to writing out the entry in pen on paper. The words are there, set aside as finished.
In the meantime, keeping my own thoughts digitally, in private sphere, has allowed me to share somewhat less personal thoughts publicly with friends and family. Social association by social association, I have been connecting myself more through blogs. Once I determined that I would speak to myself online through a blog, I started a blog for my family to interact with each other over the long distances that separate us temporarily, a place where we can feel safe to share important and private things, as well as comfortable to say silly or nonsense things. After family, I created a blog for my classroom, where students and I can interact and have a real discussion in writing and not just in the classroom. Most online teaching and course supplemental aids have some sort of blogging option, but I opted to go with a mainstream blogging tool. Aesthetically it is more pleasing and functionally it is smoother. Also, it connects the classroom with real world tools and shows how communication you learn in your writing course is not just for the writing course. I don't know which social association I will next start a blog for, but in the meantime, I am appreciating the ways in which blogging supports my real life, corporeal associations.
Oh, and this blog? This counts as the place where I work through different ideas that are interesting, fun, and potentially worth brining to a larger audience one day, i.e., that means they might not be so great right now. It is a practice place. Also, I hope that one day it will be a place where people go to find something entertainingly engaging.
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