Imagine all the bloggers . . .

When I was in an AmeriCorps program based in Denver, I heard an interesting story about a fellow corps member, Chris. He was on another team and I knew him only slightly as a sharp and somewhat enigmatic guy, but what I learned intrigued me even further. Chris was a writer and kept a prolific journal. What made his journal-keeping practices peculiar was what happened whenever he finished a volume -- he would go to the phonebook in Albuquerque, Tulsa, Milwaukee, or wherever his team was located, choose a random address, and send the lucky household his journal with no return address. He wouldn't even make a copy for himself. All his most intimate observations and accounts of feelings and experiences would end up in the possession of a complete stranger. I speculate that odds weren't too good that most of his journals avoided the fate of the graveyard of most modern things, the landfill. Yet I can only try to imagine the joy of those curious few who unexpectedly found the eccentric mind of a 22 year old in their mailbox one day. Perhaps some of them are still waiting in hopeless suspense for a sequel that will never arrive.

This was in 2002, before I had heard of the blogging phenomenon. At the time it was still possible for me to believe there would be something powerfully transcendent about diary sharing. Earlier that year I had been writing in my journal in a coffee shop in Albuquerque, a city I only planned on staying for a few weeks for a project, when I saw a young woman furiously writing in hers. She wrote in an unusual pattern, from bottom to top. Like me, she would pause between bursts of writing and look up with an expression on the stretched-out moment of hesitation before a sigh or smile. With the same passion, but different end in mind, of a sudden erotic desire, I wanted to read her journal. I wanted to propose a swap for an hour – what could possibly be a more intimate moment between two people who would never see each other again? But the standard social inhibition and concern about the creepy appearance of such a proposal, snuffed out another potential experience.

Now however if I want to peer into other’s minds and lives in such a way, I need not wait for a random journal show up in my mail or until the moment seems just right to make such a proposition at a coffee shop. I can simply do a random search on livejournal or scores of other blogging sites. Of course, blogs will not be written with the same lack of self-consciousness as diaries (and diaries themselves always presume some form of presentation and performance; while “public” and “private” are too bluntly overzealous as clear and distinct categories, it’s fair to say that the shift from diary to blog moves in the direction of public consciousness, tho perhaps also as something more ephemeral). Optimistic and pessimistic fantasies of where this shift could lead

- Imagine this utopia: Everyone in the world is a blogger (yes, there is no digital divide in this utopia). People write in their blogs as they do now in diaries or journals. In the first phase of this utopian transformation, all blogs are anonymous. Through random and strategic searches, you can swerve through the inner-most thoughts of all people, crossing boundaries of age, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, etc. Your empathy for the diversity of the people of the world becomes immense. You hear the intimate testimony of those who have been victimized as well as the guilt of those who have committed the crimes. You live in two worlds - one where people keep up all the fronts of confidence, certainty and absolute rightness as they do in terrestrial social life, then there is the blogosphere where all that is suppressed in terrestrial life is displayed most prominently

- “Private” diaries and journals were the last holdout where people could develop skills for articulating and reserve space for telling their most idiosyncratic, vulnerable and socially alien impulses and thoughts. Blogs may cover the same topics as diaries did in the past, but now under the gaze of social judgment. In the blogosphere, the defenses of wit and stylistic imperatives of the social must never be let up on, and thus these rules dig themselves deeper into our subjectivities. The truly idiosyncratic and socially defenseless imagination becomes submerged even deeper in the sea of silence.