Reviewing blogging

A recent post to a mailing list I subscribe to has got me thinking about why I blog. I have journalled off and on for a number of years. Recently I migrated to a software program called MacJournal. This program has a number of features for journalling that I liked including being able to write up an entry in MacJournal and then post it to a blog or a number of blogs. I used this for a while and I found that it wasn't really doing it for me. There was a sense of being cut off within the program and by my computer. Paradoxically, I think this was associated with where I imagined the writing to reside within the space of my machine. It was hidden away, buried in the directory structure of my hard drive. My desire to reach out to an imagined audience was somehow thwarted by the isolation of the medium within which it was produced. It was a conceptual isolation, in fact. Since there is no reason why blogging directly into 'blogger' is any different. A post is just a button away, not matter which program I was using.

I started up my own blog initially with the intention of logging my PHD progress. This was really all I had in mind. Something happened to me not too long ago that was one of those life changing and life challenging experiences and partly because during that time I was so preoccupied with just getting through it, I didn't journal or log events. One of the reasons I wish I had logged this period was that it literally shifted my reality. Writing for me, in addition to feeling like I am reaching out to others, although mostly imagined others, is also an anchoring device. It is in the traces of thoughts and feelings and in the materiality of the word, that I can see parts of myself in relation to things, events and people and how things change. Oddly, sometimes I do not recognise myself at all but this too is an aspect of my relation to the world. So I started blogging to record my PHD progress and this is still my intention. But somehow my blogging practice has broadened somewhat. The daily asides are more the meat, the PHD progress an aside. Interesting...