[I seem to have internet access again. Which does more for my mental health than I care to admit.]
I made a decision, somewhat consciously, to keep this blog personal, except for when the political became explicitly personal. Back when I first started posting, this made sense. I had other outlets for passing on news -- including membership in the news collective of a radio station that reaches 25,000+ people.
Anything I thought was important in a general way, I could get on the air or pass on directly through personal networks. Which left this blog as a forum for items not of interest to anyone not specifically interested in me. (Hence the title, a literary reference I assume few people outside my immediate family ever pick up on). I've never made any effort to reach readers beyond my family and friends, and even then I can be pretty cagey. It's never been a secret project, or completely anonymous -- there are quite a few pictures of me on here, and work that has appeared under my name elsewhere -- but I've kept it so it won't pop up if you google me, and I can be pretty stingy about giving out the url.
But lately I've been feeling short of things to say about my day-to-day life. Because, really, I'm in a set routine, and there are only so many times I can complain about schoolwork or people who try to run me over on my bicycle. At the same time, I've lost access to a wider platform for the less personal.
Meanwhile, so many things are going crazy just outside my little academic bubble. I've gotten reports of 7 disappearances in the Philippines in the last week (from sources I don't trust 100% without verification, but the evidence is pretty compelling) . A friend from Madison was beaten and arrested at a demonstration on the US-Mexico border (he's out on bail as of this afternoon, but still faces felony charges and possible deportation to Colombia, even though he grew up in the US and is a legal permanent resident). Not to mention the usual litany of horrors in the world at large.
But somehow, I still find myself trying to get information passed on through other people's websites or news shows rather than posting on my own. This is partly because I know I don't have the time or energy to update this blog consistently enough for it to function as a news source. But it's also partly because I still haven't decided whether this is an appropriate venue for that kind of material. So, I don't know. Thoughts? (and yes, commentophobes, you can call or email)
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3 comments:
Isabel, I haven't quite formulated a more general thought on blogs, of any sort, and what's appropriate or inappropriate for the WWW. When I sort out that mess for myself, I'll certainly let you know what I think. That said, for my own blog, I attempt to convey a mix of personal and often times political or bureaucratic musings. Rather than use my blog as a space to document my daily life, it's more of a path -- how I experience the process of getting a PhD. Thus, it's inherently somewhat personal but a majority of the subjects I write about, I hope, speak to a wider audience (graduate students all over and more specifically, researchers interested in ethnography, transnational flows, and commodities). As for the posting of somewhat more controversial news threads, again, it depends on your audience and what you want to get out of your blog. If you want to keep your consistent readers up to date on political happenings that you feel incredibly passionate or incensed about, I say, post them (with some associated risks of course). Most of your readers, I think, will keep in mind the lens through which they're reading...
It's not even so much a question of appropriateness, because yeah, I agree, that's a question way too huge to grapple with.
I think it's more wanting to avoid ill-informed ramblings on topics that I have little connection too. There's way, way, too much of that going on out there for me to feel a need to contribute.
On the other hand, as a student and a journalist, a lot of what I actually spend my time thinking about are politically charged current events. Often, these things occupy a lot more of my mental space than my own daily travails.
And the training we get in school discourages expressing opinions, or admitting to having emotional responses to what's happening in the world. We're meant to maintain a level of dispassionate detachment that can border on the absurd.
So it's good for me to have some kind of an outlet for that too.
I'm just trying to balance somehow.
Yes -- finding the balance is always difficult in blog writing. I wonder how information is defined as either informed or ill-informed on the internet...
I often find my blog as a way to continue discussions that are cut off at the end of a seminar or closing time at a cafe or lounge (though it seems one-sided depending on my readership!). I'm surprised at how a blog can become an experimental dive into new voices and writing styles -- an odd form of an academic autoethnography?
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