I should be working but I’m blogging. Why’s that? Must be more fun I guess. I’ve just been cruising around checking everyone’s recent postings, reading comments, checking my Flickr (Oh! someone else likes Marcel!). There’s two things here. One is that the workspace is the same, so its dead easy just to rattle off a few emails and then - in that liminal space between tasks - pull down the bookmark and you’re in. And of course, one’s own blog is a portal, a rabbit hole to an intertextual wonderland and then you’re gone, time has slipped, you’re in flow, lost in third space, safe in your own heterotopia. This is loaded with references to a shared discourse! The other, the second, is the sense that it’s more fun, less constrained, open-ended, even creative…and playfully interactive (see italicised text above). You’re hanging out with your friends, they make you laugh, you’re curious about what they blogged, they make you think, they nourish the blogger within.
So my guilt, here, is that this escape to Blogland is about avoiding what needs doing. It’s blogging as skiving, slacking off, loosing it. What will become of me? I’ll be a blog-junkie a hopelessly addicted cyberflaneur. OR….I’ll somehow be lost to my online identities, as the dracula cyberworld takes me over. I’m reminded of Borges, who writes about being taken over in the following.
…news of Borges reaches me by mail, or I see his name on a list of academics or in some biographical dictionary. My tastes run to hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson; Borges shares those preferences, but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile - I live, I allow myself to live, so that Borges can spin out his literature……Little by little, I have been turning everything over to him…
Borges and I (from The Maker, 1960)
