My Blog: Aims & Reservations
>> Sunday, September 20, 2009
I have strong reservations about blogging but I am fascinated with its differences from the more traditional forms of communication and information presentation.
Magazines, like web sites, obey a top down logic. They are organized with a clear thematic structure; conceptual unity is an important aim. Blogs are much more open-ended. They may be fragmented in the extreme, but interestingly so. They are always incomplete, but no reader expects a grand unity. What unity one sees among its labeled posts may be no different than that which emerges in found art: accidental, projected, more inferred than planned. Blogs are never finished projects though they may be shut down. But while they are maintained they offer views into a deeply personal shifting present that bubbles up with freshness and spontaneity that older, traditional forms of communication could never mimic.
As the blog lurches into the future, each post makes its appearance into public view before being shouldered aside. What appears today need not hark back to previous posts nor must it foreshadow future ones; communication thrives on the unrepentantly superficial and transient, but real insights and startling revelations are always possible! Like a life lived moment to moment each post need obey no higher organizing logic other than the forward movement of time. Themes (or obsessions) emerge (labels help) into view, but posts need not add up to more than evidence that time moves on and strange and interesting things can happen!
The whole thing reminds me of first generation hand-held electronic calculators. One I owned had a memory stack of seven entries. Each new entry pushed the most recent ones 'down' and knocked the seventh one off the list. If you imagine that older blog posts are less and less likely to be accessed as they are pushed aside -- in order -- by newer writing and if you take into account how overwhelmingly the blog's logic and structure prioritizes the here and now, the most recent, the analogy is perhaps not "in-apt". But more to the point, each number typed in could not have been predicted by the previous entries, nor could that number be used to predict future ones.
But I strain to create something more finished, complete, and unified. Perhaps what I want is for my fascination (obsession!) with Cambodia to be in plain view, from the start, in its varied manifestations. I want it to be represented in a more permanent and clear way than as an odd grouping of similarly labeled posts. Achieving that demands something more like a magazine, a magazine with permanent features, something more a website than blog. But how to get that without giving up the possibility of continuous updates?
I will seek answers to this question as this web publication is built and maintained. With some hesitation, I commit to the open-ended narrative flow of blog posts, but I aim to find space for word and picture essays about the Cambodia I love so I can share aspects of Cambodia that matter to me: its physical beauty and its natural riches, my own relationship to its land.
I just don't know (yet) if the structure of a blog is the right vehicle to do that.
Hence my reservations. :-)
