Taking Internet obsession to a whole new level: A blog about blogging, belonging, and being online.
I’m juggling four books:
Hopefully I’ll get to post a bit more about them as I write & do my notes.
Keep in mind that’s JUST for WordPress and ONLY for the month of April, 2008. WOAH! One hundred and fifty two million individual people are reading blogs… shit!
Which begs the question as to why I only get about thirty unique visitors a day… 
“As I sit at my desk writing, I am engaged with an audience that exists in other places and times… My audience is at once imaginary and real: at the moment of writing, it is imaginary; at the moment of reading, it is real. You are a figment of my imagination (in my time-space), but you are not only a figment of my imagination, having materialized somewhat like I imagined you (in your time-space). This odd link that the act of writing establishes between fantasy and reality is increasingly at the heart of human action; the self is challenged to become more effective through time and space, more capable of acting and sensing at a distance – or, following the terminology of Donald Janelle (1973), more extensible.”
– Paul C. Adams, The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces, p1
Foucault has been got; the reading begins. I quite like Foucault, though I’m not sure why. Perhaps I will be able to enlighten you (and more to the point, myself) some time this afternoon after having buried my nose in The hermeneutic of the subject or Technologies of the self or Self writing. Or maybe I will be none the wiser.
On a side note, I’ve managed to write something today that I am actually quite happy with for the first time in five months, and which actually sounded somewhat like a coherent piece of pseudo-academic writing. I say pseudo because there were no references, and the threads tying it together were sketchy, and well, quite frankly, it was written by me.
On a further side note (perhaps the upside? Or the downside? Or the inside?), I had a strange experience this morning in which I felt very much like I was in a fishbowl – but more on that another time.
1. I need Virginia Woolf, The Waves.
2. I need Michel Foucault – all of it. Maybe Foucault for Dummies (but that’s what Wikipedia is for, isn’t it?). Joking. I do need Foucault, though.
Wait, three things, actually:
3. I need a cuppa.
I need to change the picture in the title bar. My topic has changed considerably – totally will not be using any of those books anymore. Unfortunately all the books I am using at the moment seem to be bound in black, so not very interesting looking. Sigh. Need new picture. Need new picture now.
I’m feeling really good about my research today. I’m settled into my new workstation (in the room next door to my old workstation – already a much more social atmosphere, though my desk is covered in dust! Great spot, though – I can’t see the door from here so I don’t look up every time someone comes in!), I’ve got my parking permit, and I’m actually doing some thinking/writing. I’m confident that I’ll manage to churn out a few pages to send off to Supervisor M by Friday – which will be the first time I’ve managed to email her something when I’ve promised it. Normally promises of written work result in me suffering from immense writer’s block and doubting my abilities as a researcher.
Why, I ask, why can I not possess the same ability to write in an academic sense as I do to write in a blogging sense? Perhaps this is something I need to explore in my research? I rarely suffer from writer’s block (hah – I just wrote “writer’s blog”. Shit. GET ME OUT OF HERE!) when I’m blogging. Or rather, if I do, I’m not so aware of it. I just go on blogging hiatus for a few days until it passes – and then I generally overcompensate by posting three or four times a day. Maybe that’s my problem – I use up all my good ideas for the week in one day.
Anyway. Back to research. I’ve found a handful of new blogs this morning that I <3 – some of which will be read for the purposes of research exclusively (such as this Walter Ong blog), and others that I will read half for research, half for fun. I definitely need to bulk up my Google Reader-charged blogroll; I get so frustrated when my favourite bloggers don’t have ten thousand new posts for me to read each day (har har – maybe I should post more myself? Maybe I should expect less of my bloggy peers?). More blogs will mean more reading… which will undoubtedly mean more online time wastage… but it will make for a happier Erin.
I’m going bowling tonight (hah! My Wii bowling record is 204… I will not be replicating that in real life, I can tell you now!), but if I wasn’t I would definitely read some Ong, I think. I’ll have to put it on the list for tomorrow night. I need to invest in a bedside table so I can read in bed – because goodness knows that Walter J Ong makes for wonderful bedtime reading.
But now: more writing.
Some time in the near future, it seems that Channel 10 here in Perth will be running a feature on blogging! I’m sure it will be terrible and make me cringe in the same way that I cringe whenever Facebook, etc, gets mentioned in the news… but the reason I’m making note of it here is that one of the blogs I have been reading religiously for years – Karen Cheng’s Snippets of Life – will be featured!
Read what Karen had to say about the experience here. I wonder what other Perth bloggers will be interviewed?! Not me, unfortunately. I need to write something interesting, before that happens.
Cross posted to And this is what I think:
I was recently introduced to the concept of hupomnemata by my supervisor, M. She suggested that – given my exploration of writing, selfhood, and place – it might be worth looking into some Foucault and what not as a means to putting a word to this concept I’ve been playing with, rather abstractly.
I don’t know if blogs are examples of hupomnemata. In the one respect, they certainly are; the hupomnemata was written as a way of uncovering topics that the writer was personally interested in, as a sort of project through which the writer could discover more about his or her personality, identity, and preferences. Hupomnemata were written for
The idea behind “writing as technology” lies in the fact that writing is a tool, something that is not instinctive but rather that has been developed over time to serve a purpose. People have not always written; indeed, Walter J. Ong in his text Orality and Literacy laments the fact that oral tradition is suffering at the hands of the written word, because people no longer tell stories; instead, they write them down. Plato viewed writing as an abomination; unfortunately his greatest flaw was that he wrote this down.
Viewing writing as a tool sets it up as something to which we should devote considerable thought. If writing is not instinctive but rather learned, then it is something that a person must choose to employ. I can’t help but think of writing as an outlet, a way to empty some room in the over-crowded brain – as though there’s only so much that we can internalise, and whilst the spoken word is forgotten, the written word is persistent and remembered.
Why is this important to my research? Well, as a long-time blogger, I’m particularly interested in the ways in which I have come to know elements of my personality and identity through the words I have written and the topics I have explored during my years of blogging. Through writing, I discover passions of which I was not even aware. As I will discuss further in the Voice chapter, writing has enabled me to understand the way in which I think, and the tone of voice in which I “speak” (and yes – speaking can and does include writing). Writing, and the comprehension of the written word, has for me been vital for the unraveling of self that has contributed to the person I am today. Without writing, I’m not sure who I would be. The added thrill of blogging is that, generally speaking, one’s written words are available for anyone to read – and to criticise. Writing causes me to stay true to my own beliefs, but yet a crafty employment of words and tone can enable me to not so much censor myself, but to bury the truth of a situation under many layers, so as not to expose too much of who I really am. However, this in itself is quite revealing.
Keeping a blog is monumentally different to writing a book or an article or even keeping a diary on paper. The words we use, the topics we explore, the way in which we represent ourselves comes out in a blog because despite its public nature, a blog is intensely personal, and there is a connection direct from the soul to the fingertips and to the eyes of our readers. I can type almost quicker than I can think, it sometimes seems; could it be argued that to keep a blog is to hack into one’s own subconscious and allow a steady stream of self to flow onto the computer screen? And then to allow that stream of subconscious to be absorbed and indeed picked apart by one’s readers? Is the fact that a blog is public, the very thing that keeps the writer honest and open?
Further exploratory reading: literacy, writing as technology, communication, self-reflexivity, written word
