Blogs have exponentially grown in cyberspace. There are so many blogs that even the popular and legitimate media dedicates some time and space to refer to them and listen to their collective conversation(s). I have many friends who barely know what a blog is. I also know many people who have maintained blogs: some are wonderful sources of information and artistic endeavors and some are essentially public diaries that provide way too much information about very mundane private lives.
For about one year, I, too, maintained a blog, and I cringed at the thought that I might fall in the latter category. I think every person who takes the craft seriously will tell you that writing is not easy. I love everything about words and language. I enjoy tweaking sentences to get an aesthetically pleasing and/or meaningful turn of phrase. The search for the right words to precisely articulate what one means is a satisfying challenge. Yet, I continue to believe that writing--quality, self-satisfying writing--is not easy to accomplish.
I found it challenging to write in that blog every day. For one thing, I did not feel at ease with my potentially larger audience, let alone audience, period. When I am not writing to convey information or fulfill specific tasks (like school papers, newspaper articles, etc.), for me, writing is a very private act, one in which I write for an audience of one, myself. I have maintained a journal since I was seven years old, not a blog, but an old-fashioned leather-bound journal. These pages are akin to a room of my own, a place that I can turn to when I want to opine, vent, exclaim with joy and screech with anger or sobbing pain. It is the very privacy that these pages promise that allow me to retreat and relax with my pen. I am not concerned with providing a polished product. I say what I please, committing every grammatical and stylistic crime if I desire.
The very nature of a blog precluded me from writing with freeflowing ease. It is public. In fact, when you are done with a blog post, you click on "publish post" which sends your post immediately into the public sphere.
We are living in an age that diminishes the value of private rooms. This propulsion of individuals to share what once upon a time might have been private thoughts in this very public sphere called the worldwide web is a fascinating development. The act of keeping a private journal has become passe, but for those of us who require a room of our own, they might be more essential than ever.
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This is quite a well-written piece, Diane. I can certainly see that your relationship to writing is an intimate one, both in your abilities to write, but as you argue, in that desire for a space and time that is set aside from the public sphere. I am interested in the ways you demarcate “public” and “publish.” In the moment of reading your post, I felt starkly the relationship between these two terms. I would even go on to argue that they are additional keywords we should discuss in class. It would have been great to fill us in on the “room of one’s own” reference. I can see now why you were interested in the photo on my desktop, though it is definitely not Virginia Woolf. Up to this point, everyone should have written two posts. This one reads like your response to my question on the first day, “what is your relationship to writing and blogging?” I also required that everyone write an additional post for the week in which they take up an issue, either from the readings or class discussion that interested them and allowed them to take their ideas further. I would like to see this from you, as well.
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