Bi-weekly Topic for Aug. 15, 2003
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20060111040332/http://www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?WeblogAsPlace
Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What's your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?
Weblog and Place
By London and the North
Weblog and Place: participating in Ecotone Biweekly Topic
Strange that it was I who volunteered this topic for Ecotone. My weblog is one year old this week! I am very proud of it and feel it is one of the best background things for me of the last year. So this entry well all those for this week feel like some great responsibility: to do justice to the whole caboodle. Im cool. But is it a place in itself? To be honest, I never even realised I was writing about place until Pica invited me to join Ecotone as a place blogger. Ive been wondering if, since that moment, my writing, my focus has changed. Perhaps it has. I think I expect I should make more sense. To help readers / viewers locate themselves. I guess thats not really necessary. Is it?
Joining Ecotone has been a big thing in some ways. I have met or come across people who care about where they live, are moved by what goes on near and far. They may live in isolated spots but they live in a relational world in which there is room for the close up and the wider picture. This is about the most important thing in my life. The leaf on the path at my feet, the latest goose to appear, the changes in the river and the world as it is lived, not just as it is reported. My weblog is one spot where many things can come together. Rage at injustices, reflections on time journeying up and down the tracks between London and the North, art is it art?, musings about the geese on the canal and political games. (BTW, we are back to five geese. I don't know why.....)
::: posted by Coup de Vent at 8/15/2003 08:00:16 AM
Where-blogs and Place
By Fragments from Floyd
* Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What's your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?
A weblog is typically considered a means of "self-publication". I often think of mine more as a broadcast from a place. Hitting the "SEND" button to post a daily entry to my weblog brings to mind my early 'radio days'. I would tune in my shortwave to just the right frequency and pick up transmissions of real people-- merchant marines, missionaries or wanderers -- in remote places on the globe. Their listeners could tune receivers just so, pulling the exact radio signals from among thousands of wavelengths, and so maintain a connectedness with their communities on the other side of the world. Now decades later we take for granted that communications-- not only of voices but of images and all manner of digital information-- can move instantaneously to any point on the globe. From any computer desktop in the world, words can be transmitted instantaneously with no more than the modern equivalent of the Smith-Corona electric I used in 1980.
Millions of us are pouring our opinions and reflections, hopes and fears through our fingers and into keyboards and hitting the "Send" button. The transmission is remarkably easy. But tuning in to any one of those countless blog 'broadcasts' is far less likely than my finding the one of a thousand frequencies on my shortwave whose words from world travelers I could understand and that had some particular meaning for me. My weblog now is one of millions of such 'broadcasts', and finding receptive readers who would care to listen still relies for the most part on random chance of Google, or friend of a friend of a friend referrals.
But my weblog emanates from a real and permanent "address"... a term used metaphorically to locate any webpage. Fragments from Floyd comes every day from a literal address-- the same desk in the same green valley of Southwest Virginia. Many blogs' political or technological opinions and fact-streams have no bearing to their location of origin-- which may even change from day to day now that road-posting and hand-held blogging is possible. Other webblogs, fewer in number, could be thought of as "where-blogs". For these bloggers, place is central; and for some, the person and personality behind the keyboard is also integral to the information being transmitted.
Fragments for me is a way to transmit the small wonders of my daily life beyond my own perceptions, past these walls and well beyond the small world I inhabit here; it is a way of self-validation that says "I am still here and here is what makes me smile, reflect, wonder". Readers who come here over a longer period might feel that they know what I see and feel, and even what I smell, see, hear-- from Goose Creek in Floyd County-- and know, in some sense, who I am. I transmit on a weak frequency, as blogging statistics go, and not many folks 'tune in' to my frequency here on the margins of the blogosphere's map. And yet for those who come regularly and intentionally, their 'visits' seem in a way like neighbors-- recognized but mostly not well known-- dropping in for a quick hello. I know about their places too, know who they are when I see their visit records, and I can imagine their desks in their own quiet houses in towns and neighborhoods from which they broadcast. There are elements of community in the links formed by this world of self-publishers, but with great potential yet to be realized as the medium matures. Much is needed yet to facilitate the bringing together of geographic and special-interest clusters of bloggers, creating better ways to find others 'in place' in the increasingly complex and broad world of weblogs.
Meanwhile, somewhere in this burgeoning babel of voices, Fragments tiny beacon is from time to time picked up by a listener dialing across the million frequencies and they stop, tune in, and leave some indication they might come back again someday. And in this, there is the sense that my weblog has become a point on someone else's map of the world of weblogs. The reception of my words and pictures by others in other places has been a means of connecting to a sort of 'real' if largely faceless community. I have set about writing, mostly, to hear the sound of my own words, to make memories, to tell my story to me and my family -- to know what I think by seeing what it is that I will say or images I will show each day. That there are a few interested readers who want to look over my shoulder while I spin these tales and daydreams and foolishness makes the effort seem a bit less self-indulgent and certainly worth the effort.
* Biweekly topic for August 15, 2003 at the Ecotone.
Posted by fred1st at 04:55 AM | Comments (7)
Comments
Well put! I find myself at your site with increasing frequency and have even sent maps of your location to friends and family. I feel you are representative of the burgeoning throng of writers who are transforming our ideas of literary communication.
As with most paradigm shifts, by the time it is noticeable and people have started to analyze it and quantify it, it will have kicked off many derivative activities which will generate new businesses. I hope that those of you in the vanguard won't be looking around in bewilderment at all of the money being made by those coming after. Best of luck on your book.
David
Posted by David St Lawrence at August 15, 2003 05:52 AMI'm reading a book called Two Roads to Dodge City, written by a father and son, Englishmen. The father, Nigel Nicholson, knew Virginia Woolf. His mother, Vita Sackville-West, was one of VW's best friends. Both father and son are regularly open-mouthed at our American ability to reduce just about everything to a question of money.
I think Mr. St Lawrence is probably right. Those of us in the vanguard will be blinking slowly as we watch the medium turn into a cash cow. Not that we don't know this about our culture, just that it never ceases to amaze us.
Posted by trish at August 15, 2003 08:27 AMI had thought of the analogy to ham radio myself. Another comparison that comes to mind is the CB craze, back in the 70's, which like blogging was more accessible to the average guy than ham radio, which requires a license and some specialized equipment and skills.
Posted by bill at August 15, 2003 09:16 AMI enjoyed your entry. Made me think about a song by Van Morrison about the early days of radio and what would and wouldn't have come in without "those - radio - knobs". It is too early to comment on the longer term effect of blogging but it's not too early for bloggers themselves to talk about what it is like for them to blog. If another person says to me "Oh you mean it's keeping a diary online", I'll I-don't-know-what. I think your idea of fragments works well as a description and creates a set of permissions. Once in the public domain, a blog can be a stopping off point for anyone with access. And it is nice to have some filtering in the "babel/babble of voices" - ie those who choose to linger a while. Thanks for the co-founding role you've had in Ecotone, Fred.
Posted by Coup de Vent at August 15, 2003 12:13 PMI love the radio analogy. You are after my heart with that one, being that I'm an old radio guy myself.
Posted by Chris at August 15, 2003 06:18 PMI guess all of us Hams saw the connection between blogging and hamming. In fact, I extended the connection to consider cell phoning. I grappled for completion to the simile, blogging is to cell phoning as hamming is to...(CBing?)... or as reading is to TV viewing? We humans seem to have a need to communicate (whether we have anything worth saying or no). Fortunately for us readers of Fragments, there's always something worth reading on Fred's site.
Posted by Cop Car at August 16, 2003 04:05 AMFred, I enjoyed reading your entry on weblog as radio signals with various frequencies that bring news from other "desks" anchored in physical rooms scattered across vast georgraphical areas.
And I wanted to thank you for directing me to the Ecotone Wiki.
Posted by maria at August 17, 2003 02:28 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031002130400/http://www.fragmentsfromfloyd.com/archives/2003_08.html
weblog as place
By The Chatterbox
Depois de quase três anos escrevendo diáriamente neste weblog, posso dizer com certeza que ele é um lugar. Não só metafórico ou virtual, mas um espaço fisico. É como se ele fosse um quarto extra na minha casa - um com um papel de parede cor-de-rosa exdrúxulo - onde eu entro toda manhã, ou às vezes à tarde ou à noite, e escrevo os meus pensamentos. Este weblog tornou-se uma parte da minha vida. Nele eu coloco coisinhas do meu dia a dia, o que eu vejo, escuto, penso e vivo. Ele é uma caixinha de tesouros em tamanho ampliado e uma extensão de quem eu sou. E escrever nele faz parte da minha rotina, como tomar banho, escovar os dentes, beber água, dormir, comer. Meu blog é um lugar, localizado em downtown Davis, Califórnia, EUA. Meus visitantes vêem de muitos lugares diferentes e estão acostumados à várias línguas e culturas. Param para uma visita de minutos e se entretem com o que encontram aqui. Podem conversar comigo durante a visita ou só entrarem e sairem calados - mas com um sorriso nos lábios, pois isso eu garanto, quase sempre!
.....
After been writing daily on this weblog for almost three years, I could say that it has become a place. Not only a metaphorical or virtual place, but a real physical space. I feel like this weblog is an extra room in my house - the one with the funky pink wallpaper - where I go every morning, or sometimes in the afternoon or night, and jot down my thoughts. This weblog became a part of my life. Here I set little tidy bits of my days, what I see, hear, think and experience. It's like a giant treasure box and an extension of who I am. Writing here is part of my routine, like taking a shower, brushing my teeth, drinking, eating, and sleeping. This weblog is located in downtown Davis, California, USA. My visitors come from different places and are familiar with different languages and cultures. They stop by for a couple of minutes and get entertained by what they find here. They can talk to me while visiting or only pass through in silence - with a smile on their faces, though - for that I guarantee!
.....
Este texto vai fazer parte do Ecotone:writing about place, no tema de hoje - Weblog as Place
Comments
Meu blog tem paredes acolchoadas e camisas de força há quase um ano e meio... hehehe!
;-D Beijocas.
Fabiana - September 1, 2003 11:24 AM
I'm so glad to read your comments this week through Ecotone. I liked what you said and also like the pink wallpaper. Please keep writing a little in English from time to time.
beth - August 17, 2003 06:03 AM
Eu também fiquei conhecendo blogs por aqui. Foi o primeiro que li, atendendo sua solicitacao na lista de Cine-Tv (leia o meu pensamento). Dai a visitar os da sua lista foi rapidinho e a virar blogueiro tambem. E, igual a voce, virou parte da vida, todo dia, abro, leios os comentarios, respondo, posto e depois saio visitando os amigos, que ja sao tantos que nao da pra fazer num dia so! Beijos e obrigado por me trazer a este mundo!
alvaro - August 16, 2003 09:55 PM
Fer: Thanks for doing this. It's great you extended our conversation and got the courage to post in English, which I hope you'll do more of! (with Portuguese too, of course...)
Pica - August 16, 2003 02:22 PM
Eu sento aqui nessa cadeira e todos os dias dou umas viajadas pilotando meu lentium. Vou espiando um monte de quartos por aí. Vou resolvendo...comecemos pela Rosana, agora vamos ver a Fezoca, a blowg, a speed...e isso já tem uns três anos. Não tinha hábito de me pronunciar, mas depois que você pediu para dar as caras parece que tou acostumando.
Não tenho blog, só me aproveito do esforço alheio e não passa um dia que eu não visite pelo menos alguns.
Beijos
Cléu
Cleunice Rocha - August 16, 2003 05:41 AM
Eu passo de vez em quando e leio de montão, não é só entretenimento, sem saber, eu vou vendo umas coisinhas que eu não via em meu jardim, um cheirinho no ar, um babilaquezinho ali no supermercado. Vou gostando mais e mais do meu pedaço. Fico querendo contar para você tambem como são as coisas por aqui. Do tempo que eu fiquei sem provedora por causa da mudança que eu e a Nami fizemos no fim do mes passado... Bem, vou contando aos poucos. Beijo
gilberto - August 16, 2003 05:34 AM
Eu tb bato ponto aqui, mesmo as vezes nao comentando. Sabia que o seu blog foi o primeiro que eu li ?
Lia - August 16, 2003 04:16 AM
E já faz parte da minha rotina também, pois todos os dias, assim que termino de postar no meu blog, venho aqui fazer uma visitinha...beijinho no coração,
Kel - August 15, 2003 07:28 PM
Happy to have you add your thoughts to the Ecotone topic this week!
fredf - August 15, 2003 04:53 PM
presente!
Enio - August 15, 2003 03:14 PM
Source: http://www.fezocasblurbs.com/archives/2003_08.html
August 15, 0023
By Bowen Island JournalThe Ecotone community is blogging about weblogs as place today.
Look very closely at these words. If you lean into your monitor you will see that they flicker a little. Peer even closer and you see that each letter is made up of little squares. Take a magnifying glass to the screen and you notice that there is space between the pixels.
This weblog is about a place, but it lives everywhere. At the moment it lives right in front of you, little more than light shining in your eyes. Reading it may invoke a feeling of being here on Bowen Island, but it is not Bowen Island itself. It lives only on your monitor. Once I publish the words, they reside as tiny 1s and 0s on a server in Vancouver. When you reach them via a URL they fly at the speed of light to where you live and they embed themselves in your context.
Edward Hall and Marshal McLuhan and others talked about how technology extends our bodies from one place to another. The phone moves our voice boxes thousands of miles, past ears that are travelling in the other direction. Weblogs do the same with our thoughts. Those that I get down onto the keyboard become thoughts that you can read, thoughts you can interact with.
In as much as I believe that landscape lives in the mind, it is possible that what you are staring at is actually one kind of Bowen Island landscape. I recognize this, which is why I have mapped this inner landscape onto the maps of stories at the Bowen Island GeoLibrary.
But are weblogs places in themselves? I don't believe so. Come to Bowen, swim with me in the phosphoresence on a late summer evening with crickets and nighthawks chirping away and you will know what it is like to be consumed by place. The next click you make will take you away from this weblog, but it's not that easy in real life. When we are in place, we are rooted. We cannot leave without some part of us remaining behind, stretched out behind us, eventually catching up to where we now find ourselves. But with this weblog, perhaps with any weblog, we skim the surface, reside in the moment perhaps even try to peer into the depths.
And all we see when we do that is light.
Source: http://www.chriscorrigan.com/miscellany/bijournal/2003_08_01_archive.html#106098453724315930
On Weblog as Place
By Mulubinba Moments
This essay is a contribution to the fortnightly discussion running at the “Ecotone Wiki”.
I am a newcomer to “blogging”. Our weblog is less than two weeks old and I am realising how much there is to learn about computing - just to post an entry onto the Ecotone Wiki site has been a challenge. Up until now, this computer has been a work horse - it was a means by which reports were written and accounts balanced - a source of frustration as it distracted children from doing homework. I never dreamed that it could become an important means of communication with people from different parts of the world or that it would be a place of continual learning for me.
I started reading weblogs three months ago after an old school friend invited me to read theirs. From that moment I became a “blogaholic” - a daily read of my favourite weblogs and of the posts on the Ecotone Wiki was a must. Over these weeks I feel I have come to know many of the writers - I have celebrated a wedding with Pica and Numenius from Feathers of Hope, I have grieved with Fred at Fragments from Floyd over the loss of his beloved Buster. I have travelled to India, to the U.K. and to many parts of the U.S. I have delighted in the photography and I have been inspired by the fluency of the writing. This is a social interaction without the, (pardon the expression), “garbage”. Looks, body language, dress, social standing simply don’t come into it. The weblog is a means by which like minded people can interact on a simple, uncomplicated level.
I predict our weblog will be a place of learning, communication and intellectual stimulation. As a mother of three I often get “lost” in the whirlwind of activities that go with the job. Like many bloggers at the “Ecotone”, I lived in many different places as a child. I have felt many times an innate restlessness, an urge to move on from the place I currently live in - Newcastle. Being busy with “child” activities and with work I now realise had narrowed my perception of the place we live in - I had lost the ability to appreciate it and my reaction was to dream of moving on to another place. Starting a weblog has enabled me to look at Newcastle with a fresh approach - to realise that it has many hidden facades that need to be explored and written about.
This weblog will portray my journey of rediscovering the place I live in. It will be a joint effort with my husband Geoff who will occasionally add a post when he has time. For him the weblog will be a good source of relaxation and distraction from his work. We hope that other bloggers of place will enjoy sharing some “Moments” at “Mulubinba” with us.
So very happy to have you and Geoff along for the journey to whatever our weblogs and this medium will become for us and through us in the coming months and years! Enjoying learning about your inner and outer places there and thanks for this post to Ecotone!
Good to have a marker in another Newcastle - whereabouts in Oz are you? I too enjoy the space to reflect on my environment - it does make you see and feel where you are in a more grounded way I think. Looking forward to further visits!
Jenny, you've summed up perfectly my secret reason for starting my blog as well. What a wonderful thing: another reason to pay attention to where one is.
I'm so glad to be able to add my "welcome" to the Ecotone and to thank you for this entry! I'm going through a restless period here myself after 25 years in one place, and writing about it definitely helps me to continue to see the details and remember that serenity is really a product of one's inner, rather than outer, environment. I'm looking forward tohearing more from you and your husband on your site!
Blogs & Place
By O'DonnellWeb
This weeks Ecotone subject is blogs and place. Physically, ODonnellWeb exists on a Linux server in Lompac, CA. Of course, several hundred times a day it exists temporarily in the memory of whatever computer is accessing the site. That would be at least 3 continents and probably 20 odd states daily.
Oh, wait a minute. That is probably not what they meant by "blogs & place." :)
Place, in reference to ODonnellWeb is not really a physical concept. It's mental. It's the same difference you find between Where are you? and Where are you at, man? (Say the second one in a droopy stoner voice for full effect). ODonnellWeb started as a way to share my stupid humor, political opinions, and the occasional family story with a few friends. Somewhere along the way, I picked up a bunch of new friends. Yes, friends. I don't consider them readers. Ultimately, I produce this site for my own enjoyment. I'm not a journalist or columnist with some responsibility to my readers. I'm a guy with a blog, writing about whatever interests me at the moment. If that interests you too and you come along for the ride, great. If not, I'm not going to worry about it.
In the end, the site is just an extension of me. The current tagline, This is my Brain on the Internet, is not that far from the truth. I've never used a pseudonym, never tried to hide the real me. I'm not making some sort of statement, or saying anything against those that do hide their true identity. I'm just too lazy to bother. Honesty is the shortest and easiest path from point A to point B, so I took it. If I'm mad, frustrated, cranky, tired, whatever, you'll see it in the writing.
A couple of years ago, a researcher at The University of Texas asked me to participate in a study. They were studying to what extent personal web sites reflected the true personality of the creator. They decided that ODonnellWeb was an almost perfectly true reflection of me, or at least the me that I think I am.
I took that as a very good thing.
Comments
Yes, I had imagined a high correlation between the 'seeming' Chris and the real one. Weblogs are all over the map, though, when it comes to 'authentic' blogger personae, and sometimes it is hard to know what is affect and what is genuine blogger or bloggette. I tend to gravitate toward the WYSIWYG blogger myself.
Posted by: fredf at August 15, 2003 09:07 PMSource: http://web.archive.org/web/20051101072439/www.odonnellweb.com/mtarchives/000664.php
Blogging in Place
By PunctiliousThe following is my humble first effort to contribute to Ecotone. The topic is Weblog as Place.
I am new to blogging and I am struggling to find my voice. While I expect my voice to change as it reflects my life experiences, I also expect to find a cadence that is singularly me. Therefore, in thinking about a blog as a place, I view it as a place for the exploration of me. I have a mental map that defines the realities of who I am, where I come from, what I am doing, and generally where I am going. It charts my antecedents, my physical locations, my accomplishments and my relationships. In blogging, I am drawing a new map that reveals how I fit into a larger world. In that world, I, and it are unknown. None of the visual cues of age, culture, or gender predispose the conversation. There are no vocal cues of accent or idiom to define the boundaries. It is a place where I exist in a set of coordinates beyond my physical existence and I must make my mark based upon the ideas I hold and my ability to express them. In many ways it is that place marked on the map that says, "here be dragons". Unexplored. Unknown. Intimidating. Exciting. Traveling too far in the wrong direction might expose me more than I am prepared to risk. Stopping short of a destination means I might lose the point. Taking a wrong turn allows me to explore something I would otherwise miss.
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20040216213436/198.30.156.67/blog0803.htm#article70
Maps and territories
By Creek Running North
Metaphors are always riskily deceptive, and yet we cannot think without them. Put your teeth just so far apart and expel air roughly through them, make a smooth sound from your vocal cords, and then drop your jaw suddenly. Is the sound you've just uttered - "chair" - capable of bearing your weight?
Ignore for a moment the hideous mixture of metaphor in the cliché "surfing the web" — the Argiope out back might inform you that she loves it when others attempt to surf her web, and that the experience, if the web works as designed, is fatal to the surfer, and let's hope Clear Channel doesn't hire my spiders as consultants — and consider what actual motions one performs when so "surfing," which is to say not many. The word "chair" is relevant here as well. A flick of wrist on mouse, ten fingers (or two) entering email addresses and credit card numbers, maybe an occasional arching of sore back and cracking of knuckles constitute the entire range of online motion for most people, at least for websites not requiring AdultCheck.
The first home computer I used was a brand spanking new TRS-80. The first computer of any kind I used was an IBM/360. True, I mainly used it to play Coffee, but I was all of four years old at the time. A Luddite I am not. In the early nineties, I spent a significant amount of time reading and writing posts to a "conference" - an equivalent of a Usenet newsgroup, only on a proprietary network run by a lefty ISP. The conference, utne.cafe, was styled by its eponymous founders as an "online community." We preferred the café metaphor, and any number of flirtations and torrid political arguments took place around its nonexistent pool table. Relationships spilled over into the offline world, lifelong friendships established, a few hearts broken.
It's easy to see that the "café" description was a playful metaphor. With that in mind, why am I having a harder time deciding whether that's also true of the word "community?" The old café had many features that would seem to qualify it for the title, and there's precedent for the existence of non-local communities — the "community of scholars" being one that gave direct rise to Usenet. If all of us "in" the café had gotten "together" each night by way of a telephone conference call, we may well have called ourselves a community after a while, but we probably would not have defined that community by the medium we used to converse. Millions of people have friends they never talk to without using a telephone, but such people are not generally called "on-phone friends." We take pains to distinguish our online lives from meatspace: the medium seemingly demands a starring role in the interactions for which we use it. Is it an "online community," or just a community that takes advantage of a particular medium for communication?
And what is "place" but "community" defined more broadly? So I'm a bit bemused at the current Ecotone topic, "weblogs as place." There is a sly temptation, flitting out there at the edge of my id, to post a one-word answer: "no."
Put it this way: There's about a ten-inch section of one of my shelves that's filled with nature writing from Nebraska and Kansas: Swallow Summer, The Last Prairie, PrairyErth. But my shelf is not a prairie. Last night I watched a rerun of the documentary Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner wryly grinning into the camera to narrate the Owens Valley War. But the television contains neither Reisner nor the Valley: both are dead, more or less.
I write in this weblog about place, when I'm not writing about me and my relationship with myself as I see it. But Pinole Creek does not at any point along its length flow through this Pinole Creek weblog: you are less likely to hear treefrogs in this blog than you are to taste salt by touching tongue to blue ink on a map of the bay.
Posted by Chris Clarke at August 16, 2003 12:12 AMComments
Interesting entry. I wrote about maps and place twice in error for 1st August - lost the plot. Sounds like you blended maps and weblogs as place and why not? It's all connected. Maybe we could have an ecotone topic on webwriting. I love your spider entries. That must surely be the ultimate weblog.
Posted by: Coup de Vent at August 24, 2003 08:02 AM
Source: http://www.faultline.org/place/pinolecreek/archives/000523.html
Weblog as Place
By under the fire star
This is for the fortnightly topic at Ecotone: Writing About Place. Other pieces are linked from here. If the subject interests you, you're welcome to add your link to the Ecotone page.
I think of my weblog as a window; the kind you see in very old paintings, where there is a room with a person in it (me), and then a view of wonderful things, seen only partially, outside. It's the outside - Chennai - India - South Asia - that's important, not the room that holds the window, or the person in the room. Except that the person in the room has manufactured the glass through which you see the view...
I see others' weblogs as windows into their rooms, with their partial and marvellous views beyond. Their doorways ajar, opening onto hidden courtyards. I want to enter those courtyards, see what is just beyond the window's frame. The weblogs that I like most allow me to imagine that I can.
Saint Jerome in his study (Thanks, Maria.)
(Alembic recently wrote about weblogs and place. And look at The World as a Blog and see the lights in so many windows.)
weblog as place
By prairie point
When I think of my weblog as a "place" I think of this little rectangle into which I type my words. It seems like I look at this side of it much, much more than I look at the "public" side where the results are displayed. I've never really understood why this box that I type in must be so narrow. It takes up such a small part of the real estate of my screen. At least it's bigger than the comments box.
I've been blogging for about six months and I still haven't quite determined what my relationship is with the blog. I've kept journals off and on for years and I expected it to be somewhat like that but it isn't. At least not for me. At times it seems like producing a column for a newspaper. Although I've never done that so how would I know? Even though I try not to be, I frequently feel pressured to write something. And I am much more particular about what I write than I ever was in a journal. At other times however I feel that I am writing to certain people who I know read my weblog as I read theirs.
To explain how I got into this I would have to go back about two years. One day at work I went into the snack bar to get a soft drink and found a book on HTML that had been abandoned there. I got interested in it and took it home for the weekend. Our ISP provided us with a small amount of space for a "home page." Like most people I had never even thought of using it, but over the next week I started building a site. Tricia had recently given me a digital camera and I needed a forum to display my pictures. It didn't have a lot of words at first. Later, when Tricia and I remodeled our kitchen, I started to document that project. Unfortunately only about a dozen of our closest friends and relatives ever visited any of those pages, and of course nothing linked to them.
I didn't know anything about weblogs then. That came much later after I started to follow links in online news magazines. When I first started blogging myself, I modeled my writing after those political news blogs, but that didn't seem right for me. What I did feel comfortable about was writing about my garden. For years I had been intending to start a garden journal, so I decided to make my garden the main focus. That limits it's appeal. I may never have a lot of readers, but I am having a lot of fun with it.
Part of the Ecotone series on "Blogs and Place."
Posted by Bill Hopkins on August 15, 2003 08:54 PM
Comments
I started my blog with the intention of eventually making it a website, and the website was aimed at helping people garden in a cold climate. I also feel like I'm writing a newspaper column, and feel the pressure to keep posting and not disappoint the audience that I hope is there but don't often hear from. In my case, I would say this is self-imposed as part of the goal of the website.
Before I discovered blogging I was writing occasional essays and sending them off as emails to all my garden buddies. For me the blog was an expansion of something I was already doing. I love writing and I love gardening, and I would much rather read a garden blog where I follow one person's experience rather than go to GardenWeb where all the responses are rather short and aimed at answering questions. So keep writing!
Posted by: Kathy at August 16, 2003 06:37 PMLiked what you had to say here, Bill, and I'm glad you've decided to expand form your original garden theme. I'm a longtime journal-keeper too, and it's funny to compare these two experiences. I always told myself "you're really writing for an eventual reader" even in my journal, but it was really quite different from this.
Posted by: beth at August 17, 2003 09:29 AMSource: http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000135.html
A Place In Cyberspace
By Feathers of Hope (Numenius)
This is a post on weblogs as place for the Ecotone Wiki.
Writing this weblog has really been my first endeavor in online community. I have been on the Internet ever since 1990, but would only post very occasionally to places like various mailing lists or Usenet, and never hung out for very long in IRC-land. Nor have I been inclined to participate in web communities such as Kuro5hin or Slashdot, though I lurk omnivorously. There I sense my identity would get lost in the tumult of voices, whereas this weblog is more my own home, a place where my own sensibilities can emerge.
Is there something special about weblogs that make them possess more of a sense of place than other online fora? Place has always been an important metaphor for the Web -- witness the use of "home page" and "web site" -- and perhaps the combination of the graphic design elements of the Web and the prominence weblogs give to the individual writer's voice enables a strong sense of place. And a weblog is happiest when other people stop by -- it is always reaching towards community.
To turn the metaphor about, a weblog feels like a home on a street with neighbor bloggers who frequently visit, or at least check if your cat is outside. From outside your neighborhood, people occasionally drive through and comment on your choice of house paint. Outside your town, the world of bloggers is vast, growing unfathomably, but all share a desire to create their own little nook in cyberspace.
Posted by Numenius at August 15, 2003 11:02 PM
Comments
Glad you mentioned the 'home page'. A you've been online since 1990, don't you think some of the greatest attractions to the web which kept us up till the early hours Back Then was the Home Page. You could connect with amazing aspects of the real people. In recent years, the search engines don't service home pages. It's all Kellogs and Cars and Crap inc. Blogs are the transcontinental way of waving hello again to people with whom you fel some connection. Or some such thing!
Posted by: Coup de Vent at August 16, 2003 03:55 AMI notice you coyly neglect to mention that you and I met on one of these "various mailing lists" (Scribes) back in 1995 when I posted a request for the best quill knife...
Posted by: Pica at August 16, 2003 07:03 AMSeems like somebody with extra time on her hands who can't be running around right now chasing birds or collecting quills ought to post an old scroll she wrote in the 90's about Hermes.
Posted by: BuoysInMyBinos at August 16, 2003 10:25 AMI noticed he coyly neglected to mention that, too!
Posted by: Doc Rock at August 16, 2003 12:56 PMSource: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/08/15/a_place_in_cyber.html
Saturday, August 16, 2003
By TheCassandraPages
Nirvana series by Jacqueline Heer, via Conscientious
ECOTONE TOPIC for AUGUST 15: WEBLOG AS PLACE
We’ve talked a lot in these pages about the places we move in and out of: the big natural places; the created cities; the homes of our childhoods, made by others; the found places and secret hideaways; the less-easily-defined realms of the spirit. None of these places belong to us; they are bigger than we are and we move through them, marvelling at the ones that seem permanent – the night sky, the desert, the mountains – and mourning the loss of those that change or disappear. Walking past a snowberry bush today in another town, I instinctively reached out and squeezed a waxy white fruit, instantly remembering my childhood hiding place beneath my grandmother’s big snowberry bush. I wonder if it’s still there.
The blogosphere feels to me like an even bigger place than the aggregation of physical places we call “earth”; it is dimensionless, nearly unlimited both in extent and imaginative possibility, and while we may be able to trace its beginning no one can predict its future. Unlike natural physical places, it’s a virtual representation of the minds of human beings, extending with them backwards in time as well as representing, very nearly, the immediate present, and portending the likely trends of the future. That makes it, perhaps, the most human – and therefore most compelling, surprising, seductive - of all “places” ever created.
I’ve been making personal places all my life. Once, during a parent’s visiting day at school, my father gasped when he caught a glimpse of the inside of my desk. Yet what looked like chaos to him was precious and personal to me, and invested with meaning. The spaces I’ve made, from childhood corners through dorm rooms to my first apartments and eventually a rambling house and garden, have all retained some of that early “meaningful” chaos, through art, artifacts from the natural world, and the continual presence of books, paper, and words.
I wasn’t the one who discovered weblogs; J. did that and told me, long before I started one, “You ought to look at this. I think you’re a natural blogger.” When I did start The Cassandra Pages I really had no idea what I was trying to do, other than continuing the journal-style writing I’d always done, in a public way. The eventual importance of the visual content shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did; both my weblog and physical home have a lot in common – except that TheCassandraPages are neater! Ideally, I guess I wanted my weblog to reflect me as accurately as possible, but also to be as hospitable to others as any physical place I could create. Trying to consciously do that – without voice, touch, warmth, eye contact - has been a fascinating challenge.
Blogging seems to prove a spiritual truth I’ve been writing and thinking about for a long time: people want and need to have a way of saying, “this is me, this is who I am” that goes much deeper than putting “Honk if you love golden retrievers” or “I love square dancing” signs on their bumpers. We crave self-expression both for its own sake, and because we crave communion. I think the virtual places we tend to return to are the ones that feed us, not unlike the physical places we visit, remember, and long to return to. We’re all looking for that elusive sense of home, where we’ll be welcomed just as we are.
Please read more responses to the current topic at the Ecotone Wiki
5:55 PM
Source: http://cassandrapages.blogspot.com/2003_08_10_cassandrapages_archive.html#106107091223388586
The Transformation of the Logbook
By Feathers of Hope (Pica)
Another post on Weblogs As Place for the Ecotone Wiki...
In June 1997 Numenius and I moved into a 1930s cabin in the hills above Santa Barbara. Neither of us had ever lived anywhere like it and we decided to keep a journal, a logbook, of the house, not unlike a ship's log (this is when we both started reading Patrick O'Brian which might have had something to do with it). We were left with copious instructions about watering the 40 fruit trees (an inventive mixture of graywater from the outdoor and indoor showers and bucketing plus drip irrigation), so this made some practical as well as romantic sense. It was also the dawn of the biggest El Niño for 100 years, and looking back on the logbook we kept for that time (the year stretched into two), the drawings we made of the passiflora and the Channel Islands we could see from bed, the accounts of the arrival of the hooded orioles to nest in the banana tree, not to mention the account of the landslide that closed Highway 154 for weeks, it was the chronicle of an incredible time. Yet it also made us aware that all time is incredible, even when it's spent in somewhere less inherently interesting than the Trout Club.
This logbook was emphatically not our journal--which we each still kept, individually, not for public or even each other's consumption--and while there are some cryptic references (the hooded orioles we named Horace and Sally, for instance, might need some explaining to outside readers), it was a sort of halfway house between journal and weblog. We made entries on alternate days, logging rainfall (plenty in that year of floods) and the activities of the copious local rodents.
We continued with our logbook after we moved to Davis, and we continue it still--it's hard to shake the habit. The logbook is always a black bound unlined sketchbook (we're now on our fourth), still recounts the activities, birds, and other notable events of the day as they pertain to the HOUSE.
The weblog has extended this place somewhat, but I feel they are related. While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. Feathers of Hope extends the space that this shared activity has created and also the scope of our joint writing. The weblog is a place where I can write something--this, for instance--and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people than that will read it. One of them lives in Davis; another in Sweden; another few in England; another in Australia. Many are in North America.
I write this with a cast on my left leg, on a laptop (which is conveniently on my lap), looking out the back window to oleander bushes which despite the increasing heat are still miraculously blooming. The space makes it seem as though these fifteen (or more) people are in the room with me. The weblog seems to be an extension of my living room. It is always in need of some tidying, but hey, everyone's welcome anytime. The kettle's on the stove. I'd get it for you if I could get up...
Posted by Pica at August 16, 2003 03:05 PM
Comments
Glad to be one of the crew over for tea; enjoy your sedentary condition while it lasts! Soon you'll have to start getting your motion and strength back in that calf. Mend in good health.
Posted by: fredf at August 16, 2003 05:58 PMLooking forward to sharing more good times in your extended living room. I echo Fred's comments - enjoy the rest - think of the exercises ahead!
Posted by: Jenny at August 16, 2003 10:16 PMI would love to have a cuppa with you..... and I love being a part of your extended living room. I too say have a good rest now before all the hard work starts with excercises and back to tidying the living room.....!
Posted by: Jennifer at August 17, 2003 03:09 AMOh, Pica, I wish I could MAKE the tea for you and sit and chat this afternoon. Finally a cool day here with some time to catch up on letters and writing, and maybe even some weeding. J. and I hope you're recovering quickly and with good humor. OK to call you one of these days?
Posted by: beth at August 17, 2003 07:34 AMMine's a decaf with milk please!
Posted by: Coup de Vent at August 19, 2003 12:00 PMNow that i have been at your place, I can picture you and Numenius writing on your laptop and even the landscape you see from your your door and windows!
Next time I'm over there, I'll want to see that journal..... ;-)
hugs,
Posted by: Fernanda at August 20, 2003 09:24 AM
Source: http://www.magpienest.org/feathersofhope/archives/2003/08/16/the_transformati.html
the agora in agoraphobia
By alembic
UPDATE: After reading the comments left here by Nancy, fredf, and beth, I decided to add this post to the list of writings on Weblogs As Place for the Ecotone Wiki.
warning: more pontifications about the nature of weblogs
Some years ago, when I was writing a thesis on urban sociology, one of my favorite inspirational books happened to be Gaston Bachelards The Poetics Of Space. In the many moves we made since I handed in the manuscript of that meandering oeuvre written in almost unintelligible academese, I lost my copy of this book. Every once in a while, one of the more erudite bloggers gets excited about this book, and I remember fondly my own delight over discovering that space -- apart from place -- like institutions or people, was a major player in the drama of ones life.
I was reminded of Bachelard, once again, when I happened on David Trotters review of Paul Carters Repressed Spaces: The Poetics of Agoraphobia in the London Review of Books (24 July 2002). From what I gather from reading the review, Carters book may well be the Escherian inversion of Bachelards poetics of space. To put it in plainer English: Carter, in his analysis, seems to be defining the poetics of non-place, or space emptied of place. And not just any place, mind you. He is talking about a place in which the topography is all about relations.
There is repression in agoraphobia Carter claims, but the feelings repressed are the product of an environmental unconscious: an other other scene, at once collective and historical, beyond what has customarily been the subject of psychoanalytic enquiry. This other other scene is the agora as it once was in history and myth, and as it might yet become: a place of assembly, encounter and utterance; a place where people are driven together, and apart; and also a time, a (to be) remembered convergence of ideal paths. The Fall came in Paris in the 1860s, when Baron Haussmann drove his boulevards through this convergence. Since then, across the world, modernity has imposed its abstraction on the other other scene: its orbital roads, its monuments and vistas, its computerised flow of vehicles (traffic signals are said to date from 1905).
Although I havent read Carters book (looks like Ill have to put it on my Amazon wish list), I am already trying to inhabit its purported central thesis so that I might renovate its spaces and transform them into places for hosting some of my ideas about the blogosphere.
So, here are a few preliminary notes:
Distributed in a space that seems robbed of all attributes of a specific place -- from the physical to the poetic -- we populate the Web with various accounts and images of actual places in which we live. We fill our posts with utterances about how we relate to the spaces in which our lives unfold. These spaces are places that are distant to others who read our blogs, but they are visceral to us.
With each account and exchange, with each image we upload, we give dimensions and character to the spaceless and placeless idea that is blogosphere. With our stories, we breathe life into our virtual commons, and we bring back to life the other other scene of the agora -- that convergence of ideal paths.
I know that I am not the only one in the world of bloggers to have been afflicted with agoraphobia. I dont know about the others, but for me, whenever I turn on my computer, knowing that soon Ill be in the very center of that convergence of paths that is the virtual agora of the blogosphere, puts me smack dab in the center of a world populated by people whose relations to their worlds shape both place and space.
The blogosphere is not an escape form the world. Far from it. As any good and lively mythical agora worth its utterances in meaning, the blogosphere, too, depends on a constant exchange of stories -- on movement. We come to the market to trade stories. We leave enriched by knowing that the vast space beyond the shapes of the place in which we feel safe enough to move about, has features and is populated by others who speak our language.
Before my trip to Pittsburgh, PA, and London, England, of this year, I havent been on a plane since 1996. Nor have I taken a vacation, except to drive, with my family, to Jackson, Wyoming. It wasnt a fear of flying that stopped me so much as a combination of both claustrophobia on the planes, and agoraphobia when it came to visiting new cities.
As I started to read more blogs, I found myself drawn into the worlds of other people. Day in and day out I followed them, as some followed me, I suppose. It wasnt long before the worlds they described in their blogs became almost as familiar to me as my own. Is it any wonder then that when it came to going to Pittsburgh or London, I didnt feel as if I were leaving the familiar outlines of my home? Quite the opposite; I could hardly wait to see the landscape -- the shapes and colors of the place -- that was not so much backdrop, as an other character in their daily narratives. A certain pub or restaurant or art gallery was not something faceless, or without secret personality. No, I already would know something about it, something only a local would know, so visiting the restaurant, the pub, or the gallery, became a matter of re-seeing that place and making it a part of my own maps.
As an aside, but somewhat related topic: could the plethora of reality shows that are plaguing network TV have something to do with this carving for the agora, now that more and more people prefer to read blogs and create their own entertainment through blogs instead of watching TV?
If all dedicated bloggers were agoraphobic or anti-social, there would be no comments on blogs, no friend-of-friend feed discussions, no webrings ... in fact, there would be no weblogs. For what would their point be?
As an afterthought to these notes, let me just say this:
What Baron Hasumann rendered asunder when he cut up the agora with his boulevards, Tim Berners-Lee put together when he set about the weave a web of texts.
Posted by maria at August 13, 2003 01:21 PM
Comments
Another great post! I blogged about it today.
Posted by: Tom Shugart on August 13, 2003 04:49 PMEcotone is writing about Weblog as Place right now -- you ought to add this link to their page:
http://www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?WeblogAsPlace
I appreciated your comments and experience in the weblog's role in diminishing our discomfort with those places that are unfamiliar to us. I have found that, even though I write my daily posts from a very tiny place, it is increasingly populated with 'friends' who can enjoy the peace and beauty I find in our remote and 'foreign' place in the Blue Ridge. I concur with Nancy that your post is apropos to our Ecotone topic, and will add a reference link to it in the discussion if it doesn't become part of the collection of biweekly posts (which are still trickling in).
Posted by: fredf on August 16, 2003 04:13 AMWell, Maria, you made me get out my copy of Bachelard, and it's clearly due to be re-read. This was a terrific post, and I hope very much that you'll keep going along these lines. I was surprised by some of the responses to the Ecotone topic this time, because for me, as for you, weblogs are so definitely --even ultimately - "place" - but many didn't seem to agree. I hope some of us will keep talking about this. The agora comparison - cut up into streets, woven together through human discussion - is brilliant.
Posted by: beth on August 17, 2003 10:52 AMI think it is important in any case to reframe agoraphobia. It's so pathologising and does not allow for reflction on how the person feels about the world in which they are living, whether difference and understanding are things to be cared about and worked on. And I have meant to read Bachelard's the poetics of space for ever....... Weblogs really are a way of connecting with others who live on the same planet as you try to.
Then it's worth going out (of one's way).
Posted by: Coup de Vent on August 19, 2003 12:35 PMI have a copy of the book by Bachelard - I bought it by following up the "if you like this..." links on Amazon. I found it totally incomprehensible. Maybe I should have another try.
Posted by: Ian on August 28, 2003 11:35 AM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031001122845/http://www.ashladle.org/archives/000200.html
Weblog As Place
By Notes from an Eclectic Mind
Note: This is my belated contribution to the Ecotone topic Weblog as Place.
For a number of years now a former professor obstinately corrects me each time I refer to the Internet as a place. Just having completed a major overhaul of Eclectic Mind and its companion blog, PhotoEclectic, the Ecotone topic Weblog as Place strikes a particular chord with me. No cartographer has ever or may ever draw a map of the shifting online landscape yet many of us daily trot down paths weve worn into its surface.
The act of registering a domain name is not unlike staking out a homestead. Although Ive had a website in some form or another since 1995 I didnt become a dot com owner until May 5, 2001. Seven months later, after listening to Leo Laporte talking about his blog, Leoville, on the Screensavers, I signed up for a Blogger account. It would be almost a year, however, before I got serious about Notes from an Eclectic Mind.
Unlike many online journals, Eclectic Mind gives me the living space I dont have in real life. What began as a drawing board for the book Ive been talking about writing for years quickly evolved into an alternate dimension, a private public space vital to my days. I now feel that I live my private life in a bedroom, two closets, a bath, and a blog.
For me midlife crisis took the form of a complete role redefinition on May 8, 2002 when I became the sole caregiver for my best friend and second mother in the aftermath of her stroke. Never married and childless, I suddenly found myself running a household. When R.s therapists said her road back would be long and slow, I didnt grasp the full import of their words. And when they said life would never be quite the same again, I didnt believe them because I didnt want to.
My favorite old sci fi series, Dark Shadows, posits a theory of parallel time, a place where all the same people exist but lead different lives for having made different choices. On our weblogs I believe we live in selective time, sharing choice bits and pieces of our lives and viewpoints, altering our portrayal of reality and our efforts to cope with it by what we say and dont say.
The role Eclectic Mind plays in my days is not unlike that of the Round Table where Papa and his cronies used to hang out. Here, theres always a chair for me, and some reasonably like-minded and friendly folk drop by throughout the day just like I wander by their places and we talk a little. If my incomparable BlogMoxie designer Julie could figure out how to plug in a coffee pot so we could share a cup, no one would object.
I may have initially approached the daily cultivation of Eclectic Mind from a point of depression, but I didnt stay that way. Originally I came here feeling that Id lost all sense of self-expression. I no longer taught computer seminars and my home-based website business was in serious decline. Because our tastes differ so radically I only brought with me to my new home with R. those things that would fit in my room. Everything else went into storage. Cooking and cleaning on this alien level felt like a prison sentence. (Just for the record, Cinderellas wicked step-mother should have been boiled in oil for what she put that girl through and I dont want to hear any more cracks about June Cleaver.) It was all pretty damned depressing. But within weeks of writing daily on Eclectic Mind, my friend J. was telling me, I think the blog has been good for you. I began to litter my sentences in real life conversations with references to what other bloggers were writing about on their sites. Like taking out a room in crazy apartment building, I started to get to know the neighbors.
My weblog can be many places to me, a rowdy table at the local diner where stories are swapped or the quiet bank of a river where thoughts are mulled through. People who are only now coming online strike me as trepidatious pioneers, curious about whats out there but apt to flee homeward if the natives seem hostile. My little cabin made it through the first winter and now Ive added on a room or two, put on a fresh coat of paint, and gotten better furniture. I carved out this place, made it mine, and draw sustenance from it. Im here to stay.
Posted by Rana at August 18, 2003 10:06 AM
Comments
So happy to have you 'drop by' Ecotone with this addition to the conversation. I had thought you might side with those of us who have found hospitable terraine and feel a 'placeness' to our weblogs. Not all concur with this point of view. I also have another bit of info I'll send via email re 'small towns' and writing opportunities pertaining thereto. How's the heat down your way these days? Can we send you some of our surplus rain?
Posted by: fredf at August 18, 2003 01:01 PM:-) Wonderful words... Thank you!
Posted by: Andrea at August 18, 2003 07:59 PMI for one am glad you're here, Rana. You're an inspiration.
Posted by: Dorothea Salo at August 19, 2003 11:03 AMAw, shucks. (blush)
Posted by: Rana at August 19, 2003 11:11 AMThis is such a beautiful piece of writing, and so true. My own blog is my private cafe, studio, office, and lounge, or none of those, but definitely a PLACE.
Thank you for writing this.
Posted by: Melissa at August 19, 2003 05:26 PMHi Rana, I was so surprised that more people didn't concur with the view you express so beautifully here! I don't know what I'd do without my blog to live in part of the time. And I was glad to hear you say you find yourself talking in conversation about what your blog friends are writing - I thought maybe I was the only one who did that, and watched the eyebrows go up.
Posted by: beth at August 19, 2003 07:33 PM
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20031206055854/http://www.ranablog.com/archives/000399.php
Weblogs as Place
By Other Wind
Ecotone Topic for August 15—Weblogs as Place (I’m a little behind on this one.)
These are the questions:
Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What’s your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?I see my weblog as a place if I use the word place loosely and define it as a certain location or experience that is sought out, that evolves, that is built or becoming. It is a distinct locale. But roads don’t go everywhere yet, and I doubt they ever will. In some ways, my weblog is more like a vehicle or even a map. I use it to get somewhere in my mind, to express something, or to have fun. Sometimes, others visit it and use it too. The way I create it and use it reflects my mind, my life, and my physical place, but the reflection is only partial.
I like writing this weblog, but I haven’t completely figured out what I’m doing yet. So, I don’t know much about how to answer these questions. Other Wind is on a map, in the sense that it is linked to from other locations. Links on Movable Type and Weblogs.com, on search engine results, or on other bloggers’ sites tell people how to find it. And it links to, or tells people how to find, other sites.
My husband, David, points out that a weblog, or any site on the web, is different from a physical site because you can visit it directly, and usually quickly, from any location.
Weblogs are controlled locations, though, and their environs are not left to chance. Comments from the outside can add a dimension of otherness and perhaps chaos, but they too are under control. They can be turned off or deleted. Weblog content is chosen and portrayed by a single person or group. So, weblogs are places we can visit, but they are not as organic and eclectic as physical sites likes towns and buildings populated by unpredictable people or like wild sites populated by plants and animals.
CommentsAnd yet the place of my weblog invites others to visit me in real space, and several have done so. More of this to come, as our community becomes face-to-face acquaintance.
Posted by: fredf on August 21, 2003 08:46 AM
Source: http://otherwind.fademark.net/archives/000396.html#000396
[Lifescapes]
I imagine my weblog as a kind of window on our 31 acres of Texas hill country. It's my view of this place (a view colored & shaped by the views of many different places I've lived and traveled and read about), and of the way I feel about it, and of the way it seems to shape me. The window looks out on weather, on plant and animal wildlife, on the dogs and geese and sheep and gardens, and on me, working outdoors around the place, or at my computer, or in the kitchen or in my favorite chair. I try to make it as inclusive and as authentic as I can. But I'm always aware that the window is also a view IN, for the people who read the log and who are curious about this place and the way we live here. It's a selected view not the whole. A window never looks out on all the landscape. And when people try to look in, they sometimes can't see through the curtains, or into the dark corners....
Blogs as Place
By Panchromatica
There is a fascinating discussion going on at Ecotone about the idea of blogs as place rather than being about place.
I'm currently trying to read a hefty book called "The Production of Space" by Henri Lefebvre. According to the blurb this is about:
a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live).
Now my reading of this so far is still patchy and incomplete but what is interesting in the present context however is actually a comment by the translator to the effect that:
English speaking experts tend perhaps not to use the word 'space' with quite the same facility as their French speaking counterparts use the word espace, but they do have a corresponding fondness for such spatial terms as 'sector' and 'sphere'. (footnote p8)
Now what I think that means is that the idea of non-physical space is more than just a metaphor - and I think I agree. Lefebvre is probably not the first to make that point. His book dates from 1974while about 10 years before that another writer, Melvin Webber, wrote an article called "The urban place and the non-place urban realm". His argument was that communities of interest no longer depended on propinquity. I haven't been able to find a URL for the article but this is from a paper on a similar theme
In 1964 Melvin Webber challenged the notions of community and centrality used in urban studies by demonstrating that ‘community without propinquity’ was emerging within certain social networks. He argued that individuals were enmeshed in an overlapping range of groups, and that increasingly these social networks were not limited by physical or geographical location.
This is long before the web and even before much of the writing of Ted Nelson so Webber was pretty much ahead of the game. (Interestingly however Nelson coined the term 'hypertext' in 1965!)
What this all means I think is that a weblog, especially one with a wide user base offering commetns and discussion, is a place, incorporating many of the characteristics of a physical locality but adding new features of its own. After all how often do we see terms like 'drop by' etc in relation to someones blog?
Could sites like RedPaper be viewed similarly?
Comments
Ian, thanks for joining the discussion at Ecotone and for your astute comments. My blog feels so much like a "place" that I sometimes feel if I looked around the corner, the commentators would be gathered for dinner! I think the reason we are all a little perplexed by this is simply that this way of interacting - using our minds but not our physical presence - is so new.
Back in 1982, I wrote my thesis on urbanism as a series of social relations and the role of communication patterns in the organization of these relations -- highly theoretical stuff, but the essential points were that place is a relation to space, or a way to integrate space.
In plainer language: I agree with your conclusion about the kind of "place" a weblog is -- one that is challenging some of our notions about place.
Discussion
Can anyone find a thread that unites those of us who associate elements of physicality to our weblogs and writing, and those of us who do not? I wonder if we all knew each other well enough, could we find a concrete-abstract divide in points of view? Is it that some of us are willing to allow our metaphors to help us think about ourselves in relation to place, while others are more objective, and take themselves out of their words to a greater degree? I haven't the foggiest idea what I'm talking about here, really, but would like to see us interacting on these topics a bit more. I'm really tickled with the turnout for the biweeklies so far. Hope we will continue to find a few more souls around the periphery of the blogosphere who share our interest. I wonder too about writing as we are now to a biweekly topic, but have that be some snippet of literature about place, a quotation, that sort of thing. Many of you are quite conversant with the A-team writers in this genre. Something to think about. -- Fred
Seems to me that if there's a "divide" (and I'd rather not see it that way) it is over how we define "place" to begin with. Some are involved here because they write and think about physical places where they live; they are more in the realm of nature writers, or urban sociologists/anthropologists. "Place" is the desert, or the ocean, or the city. Others are coming at "place" from a more metaphorical perspective, and their comfort area tends to be more literary or spiritual, and less, perhaps, biological. But I think those lines are blurry. Isn't it great that we have so many perspectives, and that new people, not necessarily tightly-defined "ecological" or "nature" folks, are considering these topics? I'm also finding reading the comment threads on the various posts very interesting, and it doesn't bother me that there isn't as much discussion going on here. --Beth
Substitute "difference" or "dichotomy" for "divide" if this word seems devisive (and isn't that too many "D" words in one sentence to be legal in some states?) I agree the 'lines' are blurry and I am much more a lumper than a splitter (sorry, biological reference from 'the old days') and am enjoying the different perspectives. I'd be happy to hear some of these points of view elaborated in discussion here, but who am I kidding? If there was a really interesting conversation going on here at Ecotone in recent days, I would be hard pressed to participate; I am thinking of renaming Fragments to "Kibbles and Bits"... know what I mean? -- Fred
There's generally a pretty good view of the landscape from atop a divide. -- Chris C.
I think there's plenty of room in the meaning of "place" to fit an intellectual activity like a blog, and there's ample precedent: You might even say the blogosphere is a sub-universe of cyberspace.
As one who only visits, I can't speak to the psychological status of a blog, but it seems as if most of you (we?) who write about places invest them with meaning beyond their root-and-pebble reality. So it's no surprise that some people also give the blog itself that extra dimension.
Want another challenge? How about coining an arresting, evocative term one could substitute for "blogosphere" -- which suggests "Brigit Jones' Diary" rather more strongly than "Walden." I mean, is a blogosphere more like a billiard ball or an amoeba; do I, as a visitor, orbit it or invade? - P.
This is a discussion I would love to be able to contribute to in more detail – work pressures prevent me from mulling over the points and developing a long argument in support of what I am about to say, but here it is:
There is space, and then, there is place. A space is the same, whether or not we describe it or rhapsodize about it. A place is born in our description of our relations to that space. Place is the story of our relation to the spaces we inhabit.
That is my take on it. Hence my view that, yes, the blogosphere is a place. If place were so independent of our perception of and relation to it, those of us hailing from the same spatial coordinates would be writing much the same thing. My reports of, let’s say New York, would be like that of everyone else who lives in that city.
Okay, this is simplistic, but I wanted to throw into the discussion the notion that place is a relation to space…. -maria
Thanks Maria. I needed clarification on these terms, and hope there will be more to come. Ian also, I think you can contribute to this discussion to educate those of us (at least me) who are less aware of the way these terms are used and how we should understand them in our discussions. -- Fred
Source: http://web.archive.org/web/20051220140959/www.magpienest.org/scgi-bin/wiki.pl?DiscussWeblogAsPlace