My friend Zen discussed some aspects of personal blogging (the kind I’m more comfortable with than “publishing”) on his LiveJournal today. The post is a bit personal so I won’t link to hit here, but those of you that know him read his posts anyway. He makes some interesting points, all of which apply not only to LJ but to personal blogging in general:
It is my belief that an online journal/diary is inherently meant to be public, or at least read by someone else apart from the author. Unless you really hate using your hands to write of course. So a paradox immediately arises: a journal/diary is usually a record of its author’s most personal affairs/feelings/thoughts, and now it is in plain sight of the world. In my mind, the sacrifice of either end of the paradox used to be unacceptable: a journal has to be private in nature but if it cannot be read by others then the very existence of online journals lacks justification.
Then it suddenly dawned on me last night: Momo talks about her studies and family, Nick presents everything that is interesting/weird and has happened to him in as a witty way as possible, Lane literally takes his heart out and dissects it for you, Norm muses (sometimes angrily) over political and philosophical issues, Ronald either philosophises about things or copies out extracts from his textbooks, James tells his going out adventures every night, sometimes in jest, sometimes earnest… What is personal about something like LJ is not in the things we talk about themselves, but what these things say or reveal about us. Intentionally or unconsciously, we are always constructing an image of ourselves for other people who read our entries. These images may not be the replica of our true self, nevertheless the two are intimately related because they’re how we want to be seen. And that’s what makes LJ personal.
He’s really hit the nail on the head here, in a way that I haven’t been directly aware of until now. While on occasion I’ve felt the need to blast open the floodgates of my mind, to me the real advantage of blogging seems to be the expression of perspective. In my photos of Japan I’ve deliberately never included myself in the images. At first I thought this was out of some sort of expression of anonymity or attempt at humility. In truth, I’m not really anonymous– anyone who knows how can look up the owner of this domain name. Neither is my photography an exercise in humility; I’m publishing the photos because I want others to see them! In reality it’s a much simpler reason. When I look out at the world, I don’t see myself. I look for things that are amazing or beautiful, and I take photos of them. And that perspective probably says more about me than my full name or where I live.
The problems and implications of self-representation has for some time a matter of my endless fascination. My own little LJ page, with its sporadic updates and peculiar non-sequiturs, its rambling, its prior expression of opinions and feelings I can neither presently claim to nor even to hold, has created in my mind a lot of questions in its own right.
I’ve been self-conscious for a while, for example, of the fact that the single greatest enabler to my personally venturing to make a post is having my tongue firmly in cheek. Satirizing the very representation I self-consciously construct on such a forum is one of the things I most enjoy — by creating, for example, a version of myself that I, for my own part, find both humorous and amusing.
I’ve noticed also (as a sociology student commenting on an old post of mine was only too keen to bring to my attention) was that only thing that often prevents such a tongue-in-cheek construct from appearing obnoxious and even incendiary is the inside-knowledge of who I am; not only do I almost purposely misrepresent myself, but I seem to do so in a very specific way: without, in fact, deviating too much from who I really am.
I have rather a distrust for the supposed stability of meaning underlying such self-representations. What, I ask, do our blog personas truly signify? And is that thing being signified, in fact, stable and unchanging?
Perhaps I can be accused of flaunting this very distrust with gleeful abandon.