Blogtrax

The Blogtrax enterprise speeds along its timeline towards the Inside Out paper and the Miami destination. Destination or station? It seems more like a journey or a duration than anything else. In some sense Blogtrax was complete at its inception, as good a part of the process of turning inside out as any. Blogging seems to work in an inside-out-sort-of-way. Face to face we may begin with academic/professional persona (maybe later on some personal stuff floats in); in blogging we start with ourselves (or the MilkTray version) then bring the academic/professional in from time to time. Maybe.

inventive and ephemeral media need to be sustained (…..) that are sites of experimentation for practices of writing and linguistic performance; for language, both written and spoken, is everyone’s commodity, the site par excellence of anonymous practices of creation and circulation, in which culture, and thus a freedom, is crystallized and concretized. (deCerteau, 1997:128)

Our edited, reviewed, revised and published texts begin and end, are complete and bounded despite the fact that we claim they are part of an ongoing conversation, but our postings are much more spontaneous, even at times inchoate, rambling, half-connected and never complete. Perhaps at best they are insider stories. They turn inside out - and this autoethnographic process does this, too. The inner workings of jottings, musings, impressionistic thoughts and emotions go down, go public prior to substantial reworking. And as they go along they collect and discard readers, comments, and other links. Later postings begin to allow new readings of old ones and what seemed like a well-worn track along which the research process progresses becomes one path among many.

Still, there’s analysis, and summation, writing up and the whole tricky business of presentation. The part where you start to lose depth by attempting to achieve coherence. We have to learn to handle complexity and turn that multidimensional patchwork of bloglives into something else, something more conventional and bounded. But, really, to be faithful to the enterprise, even the early drafts of paragraphs and fragments and bits that will eventually be hidden or deleted are potential postings on Blogtrax. Another avenue for publication, capturing the process on the move as far as one ever can.

I’m currently involved in an interesting little skirmish with my university over whether or not to include my blog address on my ‘business card’. Strategic? Nope. I was downright sneaky. Here’s how it goes. You have to fill in a form (surprised? No, OK). I did. But, I didn’t put the blog address on then, though. I bided my time and then intercepted the process at the pre-print stage - a separate department, naturally. That’s when I said, casually: ” Oh, by the way, I’d like this on too.’ No problem. No problem, initially that is.

Then they got back to me. “I think we’d better have your work URL as well.” Of course, I conceded thinking the matter was settled. A little later on I got an email explaining that if they put both web addresses on “it would get a bit squashed”. OK, fine. Fine by me, let it be a bit squashed.

Now, today, somebody senior (a man) who’s in ‘marketing’ wants to talk to me about this blog thing. Do I cross the border into open conflict? No, not just yet. I sent the man the shortest of emails “Is there a problem?”. No reply yet. But, is there a problem? Might I get the sack or draw the university into ill-repute (never mind the fact that they’re already forking out money to fly me to Miami to talk about blogging)?

Then I start to wonder if this blogging lark - you know, the stuff that gets talked about on Woman’s Hour - really is subversive. What are they afraid of? Loss of control? Is it that speech-like quality of blog writing? I mean, who’s afraid of the blogger’s voice. DeCerteau comes to mind.

To speak means to come forward and to locate oneself in one’s sphere of existence; it means to claim a modest quantum of agency. Circulation of speech carries the seed of the overthrow of the established powers, hence the interest that authoritarian regimes have in controlling the exchange of words, information, and ideas, and also the endless efforts to assure themselves total control over all modes of communication.

( deCerteau: The Capture of Speech 1997: 98)

Crikey, me and Margaret are getting radical.

It’s interesting how some things get blogged and others don’t; how some people blog and others just don’t see the point. The not-blog concept explored… First, in the un-blogged universe, all those things in bloggers’ daily online/offline lives that are not blog-worthy (for me that’s things that get seen, done, read, visited that are not particularly interesting or thought-provoking); second, those things, places etc. that are too difficult to blog (no access, too dodgy, no camera); third, those ideas, concepts, and so on that are un-formed, messy and too difficult to express; fourth, those events, thoughts etc that are, in some way, seen as private. Well, of course, you could add to or change the list, but it seems to miss an over-arching blogger’s decision - an editorial decision - how much to blog.

My original intent as a blogger was to lean into Third Space, to find expression for ‘current pre-occupations’ which didn’t get voiced elsewhere (actually, I hoped at the point to remain anonymous, so it seemed more a matter of ‘getting it off my chest’ rather than being read by X or Y). But this meant surrendering to the form - keeping it fairly brief, coherent, readable and, yes, interesting - just in case someone important to me read it! Yet even then there was a boundary, a blog/not blog boundary.

An example: in the blogs I visit, there is little reference to the minutiae of everyday life. Where we go, what we do is usually only referenced in an oblique way. Here’s an enigmatic reference, a more explicit reference and an implied reference to places we went/ things we did in meatspace. Clearly, there’s so much silence, unblogged, not-blog stuff (and why not?). But it seems important to ask why some things ‘get in’ and others don’t. The concepts of audience and purpose could be helpful here. My intial intent (above) was quite purpose-driven - you could call this Third Space thinking/writing; but audience known/unknown has gradually become important too. Will I say something interesting, (clever!), entertain…will my readers like me…will they return?

There’s probably not enough space to even begin to open up the other dimension of not-blog, that is those, and there are plenty of them, who don’t blog or don’t see the point (or don’t know what a blog is). It might be worth some exploration, though. If we are to understand what it’s like to be a blogger, what this particular engagement with digital culture is like, feels like, and becomes then it must be set against the backcloth of not-blogging. What does it do that is different? What’s the attraction? What’s the point? (Or, alternatively, are they the wrong questions to be asking in the first place?)