Anniversary Words

Sas marks the first anniversary of her blog this weekend.  My hunch is that the first year of any blog is probably quite important in terms of establishing the tone and topics and readership, although of course these things can change over time.

One of the things I have enjoyed most about reading the writing of others in the last year or so is the way in which we are starting to theorise our own work, to think more wholeheartedly and in a more extended way about what is the special character of writing online, of keeping a journal online.  Sas writes of it in the post linked above in this fashion:

I am a blogger because I believe it’s a radical thing to take your life and share it. The internets to me, is a metaphor for how we are all connected. So there is a special pleasure in reading your comments. Or in seeing a link back to this blog.

Paul has also commented on this recently, in the context of a discussion on writing online and gender politics.

The blogs I enjoy most are written by people … who have things in common and who enjoy each others’ online company. … I haven’t done the sums, but it seems that a fair proportion of the blogosphere is of this kind. Writers have interests; they share them; others comment. …

My point, such as it is, is that there is a lot more to blogging than fussing and fighting. There are a lot of good writers out there who might otherwise not be published. For the most part, they are not professional writers nor professional politicians. They are not trying to win an argument or to advance themselves professionally. They just write about their interests, for the joy of writing and reading. And they do it rather well.

And of course Giovanni’s entire blog project, beginning here, is embedded in a consideration, or even an interrogation, of what it is we do when we do what we think we do.

These examples are just a small selection of what we’ve got going on, but the ideas they raise characterise the way in which I think about what I do here.  Call it slow blogging: the ongoing conversation that accrues value over time, the weighing of our words and the weight we place on the words of others, the step-by-step building of community.

I’ve been keeping this journal for five years now; December 17, 2003 was my first post.  Most of those early entries are under password-protection now, primarily because my life was rather tumultuous at that time and my systems of pseudonymity not yet regularised.  I moved in different online circles then and had not much idea of what this space might engender, but that lack of expectation has meant surprising fruit.  In that time, the internet has become a much more mainstream forum for social interaction, to the extent that I tend in conversation to refer to my friends as online or offline, much as one might divide up the world into islands north and south.  Five years ago, onlinery was a rather more furtive activity.

So in the spirit of being outward-looking rather than unnecessarily introspective, here is a poll for you to join in this small anniversary.