Blog vs Journal
Struggling the past couple of weeks deciding whether to write in blog or in the more traditional journal, with pen and ink. I've kept a journal for almost twenty-five years. Now, with access to this blog, I feel some pull both ways . . . but what does that mean, both ways? Tonight, I want to think about the private journal.
Supposing one keeps a journal that nobody ever reads? This ought to make it, then, not so much a journal as a diary. Dear diary. The diary, as a cultural phenomenon, contains all sorts of pablum and splash: emotional outburst, self-pity, whining, narcissism, shallow self-analyses, shallow analyses of others, the day's weather. It's a record of the worst of one's character & discipline. A site of delerious masturbation!
Now suppose that you save everything you write, every spiral-bound, thin-ruled volume. This says maybe your work isn't so private after all. The voyeur, perhaps some niece or grand-nephew one day, or a graduate student in anthropology, is invited. When the mark is made, the word inscribed, the voyeur is sent his invitation. But not for tonight. Maybe when you are dead, maybe long dead. (But you toy lasciviously with the notion that you will one day be exposed!) There is so much of the posthumous about writing: the breath preserved.
Now, here's one immediate difference between the saved private journal and the blog: delay. Delay has its effects, structurally, upon thought. It makes sex furtive and delectable and unreal. (Something to note for later consideration: my response to the Web--emails, chat rooms, discussion groups, instant messaging, now blogging--even when I participate only as voyeur, is squeamishness.) If you write something about yourself in your private journal in, say 1987, that you return to read in 1999, who is that later person? The most intimate of voyeurs. Writing anything, there, knowing that one day "you" may return for a peek at your old self (two selves so very private that there are no mediating readers, no "public"), you are Narcissus.
But there is no knowing the later self until it returns, prodigally, to the site of the earlier self. And therein lies the beauty and the distaste of the self-written text. Barthes: "Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language." Even one's own handwriting has changed over time, as often as one's one. (Has anyone ever studied this phenomenon among writers?)
So there you have it, the most private of texts, the personal journal never shared with anyone but one's potential self, in a way writes that self into existence. And one comes back to it as the Prodigal Son. How impossible this is with blogging!
I'm not I understand the difference, especially "delay." True, if you write in a diary or journal, the text disappears as soon as you turn the page, but still it remains there to read when you turn back the page. The blog has a similar characteristic. Depending upon the blog's configuration, a specific instance of writing disappears into the archives after a set length of time. For instance, here the main page of this blog is rebuilt every seven days, and entries older are archived. They disappear from one location and appear in another.
Well, blogging to me _is_ writing, but with a medium different from paper. I'd think that a text is interiorized no matter the technology used to compose it. True, this blog could in fact digitally disappear, just as a paper journal could disappear in a fire or flood, but, having been composed, would still exist mentally and visually.
You are reinforcing my point, which I may not have made very clearly. Which is that with the private, handwritten journal, the text "never" disappears. Even if I try to erase it or scratch it out, some residue of it remains (as some criminologists might agree), even in the form of a palimpsest. It is always available to me from now on, visually. Regarding the creation and maintenance of a blog site, something that disappears in one location only to appear in another is an order apart from (hand)writing. What's more, since I have not yet interiorized online technology (web technology, Internet--see? I don't even yet have a logos associated with it, but many), how far blogging is from becoming a part of me, noetically speaking.
I don't (yet) accept that, say, 20 years from now, I will return to this weblog and meet myself as a much older man. It may happen, but I am hardly confient of it as I am with the traditional private journal medium.
Now,this may be somewhat Heraclitian. That is, the technology will have changed considerably and so will I have changed. What's more, I may no longer be interested in web technology (I can at this point imagine that), while I shall never lose interest in pen and ink (i.e., I cannot imagine that).
An accompanying point: you and who knows who else are reading my blog entries, virtually instantaneously. (This is the charm and attraction of making a poem via Wiki.) You will never, while I am living, get a look at my private journal.
But thanks for goading me towrad a new idea: the "flowing philosophy" underlying blogs. That warrants some thought.
I think I agree with you. Westerners interiorized "text" millenia ago (think of the scribe who first captured Homeric legend). It's the technology that continues to "face" us in ever new and various forms--like this year's newest flu virus?--and requiring us to expend some noetic energy becoming "one" with it (i.e., making it a part of our interior landscape or psyche). That's what I'm referring to when I talk about anything having to do with the Internet, including blogging.
This shouldn't be understood as a devaluation, but rather as my own struggle to bring it inside. I am the recipient of 2,500 years of Western efforts to bring text (i.e., textual glyphs) into my being, and 500 years of European efforts to bring print technology there. I've only been working with the more ephemeral forms since I bought that Macintosh in Wilmington in 1985! And with the Internet for a paltry 5 or 6 years! And with blogging for what, weeks? Marchall McCluhan rides again!
I don't believe anybody has fully interiorized Internet textuality yet--the proof is in the rapidity of experimentation and innovation continuing within this realm. That is, it's still out there, "facing" us. We can still "see" it. It will be fully interiorized the day it becomes invisible to us as a technology.