Public Writing

Now, if you had asked me a year ago about the nature of blogs, I would have said that I very much consider the "blogosphere" to be a public writing space. I give you the same answer today. The only difference is that a year ago, I was a reader of blogs and now I am a writer of one. I feel the "publicness" of the writing very differently now that I have to produce it.

I've been silent on my blog for about two weeks because I haven't felt that I've had any thoughts that are "public-worthy" (just a closet full of hoarded private thoughts, stacked up like Elaine's sponges). I know all of those French theory dudes argue for the primacy of speech over writing as irrevocable, but I am feeling a definite pressure to make what I put in this blog worthy of utterance. I shoot off my mouth all of the time without caring about the relevance of my words, but I cannot yet let myself do that in my blog.

All of this, of course, is making me think about the impact that blogging will have on my students (if you check out my profile, you will see that I am doing this in prep for requiring my students to blog in the fall). I wonder if they will feel freed by the nature of the blog, free to try out ideas, or if they will feel like I do, constrained by the public nature of the blog.

This line of thought brings up the notion of audience again. I have no idea who the audience is for this blog. In reality, I can be pretty sure that it is nobody. However, I still invoke or invent an audience and try to write with them in mind and shape them in my mind as I am doing so. I can have fun discussions, then, about audience with my students.

One final point about my own blog: I find myself simultaneously attracted to and repelled by the desire to post self-centered entries such as this. Blogging is an easy form of navel-gazing, but it does not have to be. The blogs that I like the most are 80%-90% about current public events and only 10%-20% about the blogger's own life. I want to strive for that, but geez, who has time to troll the web all day looking for cool links to post into a blog. Hmmm....I can see time is another topic I will have to take up with my students.