The best thing I’ve written so far:
Surely ‘place’ is a challenging, if not unusual, concept to investigate in relation to the Internet. The context is non-physical by design, and this is seen as one of its many benefits: boundaries are broken down and space rendered meaningless. But then again, we are also regarded as existing beyond corporeality, online – to an extent, at least. In fact, thinking about what it means to be online has changed significantly in recent years, to the point where it might not even be fair to consider the Internet a non-physical space. The cyberpunks tried, but it seems that we’re indelibly tied to our bodies, and therefore to our (offline) physical surroundings.
Bloggers are an interesting group to consider. For the most part, the subject matter of the blogs I will study deal not with the documentation of online findings (although they do to some degree, for sure) but rather with offline, embodied experiences. This project will question our reification in the online context, not as individuals roaming the Internet free of our fleshy encumbrance, but rather as existing simultaneously in (at least) three different places: as actors behind the computer screen, blogging everyday occurrences both for oneself and for others; as a part of the ongoing, continually written history preserved between interfaces, perpetuating online forever as a memory; and as a character in the story of one’s own life, consumed by a somewhat imaginary audience on the other side of the screen.
And is that a concern, or what? But this is the tone I like to write with… so why am I struggling so much?
90% doubt, 10% lack of preparation. This sucks.
1 Comment
August 30, 2008 at 6:07 am
Yeah, well, that’s how it is and how it will be as far as I can see. I think the blogging phenomenon is leading us into a way of being that will serve us in the future and perhaps even aid in evolving us as a species.
How about that???
Sandy