4: October 2003 Archives
This Friday will mark the third anniversary of the day I began publishing on the web on a regular basis. Google has been kind enough to archive my first, most primitive web layouts, ones that I put together for a project in an English class I took during my senior year of college, in Fall of 1998, which precede this date. I find these cringeworthy now, and I try not to look at them. They were meant to be personal but creative, and reading them back now, they sound trite and overstated to me, though, for the record, my English professor loved them. Nonetheless, I have the impulse lately to consolidate my writing into one place, and so I'll probably bring them here someday soon.
As an aside: I state all this not as a way to vouch for my credibility, but rather because CY has challenged me to write my rebuttal in a narrative fashion, because what I really need in my life is more challenge. I told her that because I was trying to be ironic, but she decided to make sure that I actually get the extra challenge I so desperately need in my life. But I digress.
When I first started writing online, the medium served as cheap therapy for me. I was in the midst of a very long period of depression, and it served as catharsis and a way for me to express myself at a time when I didn't really come into contact with many people. For several months, I never even knew that there was a journalling community, and it was a couple of years before I realized how far-flung it extended. I'd been writing for six months or so before I ever heard of a "blog," and even then, I didn't completely understand what the word meant, or what a blog was. (Phil would be happy to corroborate that I live under a rock when it comes to certain new web technologies.)
Within the context of the online writing community in which I was figuratively raised, a blog was something completely different from what we were doing. Within the context of the journalling community that I come from, the image of a blog evolved into a form of online publishing that focused on the external, reporting things that happen in the world around you, rather than on the more introspective kind of writing that made up journalling.
Obviously, weblogs were invented long before the spring of 2001 when I first heard of them. Lloyd began writing in his weblog in May of 2000, using the term "blog" at a time when I didn't even know online journaling existed.
The way I see it, the two genres evolved parallel to one another, and those who adopted each genre over time have had a very wide berth to develop a style of writing appropriate to themselves. To me, the difference between a weblog and a journal is often semantic and nothing more. There isn't a barbed wire fence that runs along the border between the two genres. For the record, I consider much of the content that I post upon this page to be weblog material, but I'd probably classify this as a journal entry. I don't know how my page fits into the diaspora, but that's the least of my worries.
My writing has evolved a great deal since I began publishing on the web. The voice of that writing sounded nothing like what I generally publish now. What I wrote then was intensely personal, and the audience was different. This website is meant to be more public, but that means that I self-censor quite a bit -- after all, family members, friends, and co-workers all read it. Still, my writing voice continues to develop every time I write something meaningful here in these pixels I call my own. Likewise, my photographic skills have evolved over time as I've developed an audience and challenged myself to advance. The improvement comes from practice, and from the fact that I know that at least 150 people every day come here to delve into my life, and I'd like to think it has nothing to do with whether I call this medium a weblog or a journal.
All this is to say that I feel like a troublemaker for getting Lloyd all riled up over what I see as a semantic difference in the first place. (In my defense, the conversations in question actually happened ages and ages ago.) Whatever elitism journal writers might participate in has absolutely nothing to do with the writing done in within the IU extended community. Based on the definition that I understand, those would be defined as journals anyway. Perhaps this page would be defined as a journal, as well. I called it a weblog when I first built it, but its function has changed over time. Ultimately, your genre is whatever genre you most identify with, and the definitions (and opinions, for that matter) of whatever establishment might be pertinent lose meaning anyway.
It should be noted that one of my weaknesses in narrative writing, which got sort of sidetracked about halfway through this entry, is that I'm awful at conclusions. Therefore, this is the very non-narrative conclusion. The End.
