At Blogher08, I sat listening to bloggers read excerpts of their work. At the end of day one I found myself caught, like fabric on a zipper, to these words:
“Stories”, she said, “we come 8,000 miles to tell stories.” I then recalled all my hesitations, critiques if you will, surrounding the art of blogging. A few are as follows:
“Simply trivial”
“Valorizing the individual experience”
“Normalized narcissism”
While my skepticism never disappeared, with the discovery of my first blog, I became quite voyeuristic if not stalker like towards this Internet phenomenon. Loitering first for ten or fifteen minutes and then hours in others lives, perceptions and thoughts. A tight anxiety soon began in my stomach, crept up my chest and nestled in my throat when reading blogs, especially those that wrote about subjects like women and media or art, topics I felt so passionate towards. Years of therapy had taught me all too well what this snaking anxiety meant. I envied them. I envied their ability to transform their thoughts into words and leave them to linger in the vast unknown void we call the Internet. The possibility of where those words could go, what they could turn into in another’s mind, how they could be translated, remembered and most of all how one felt when released of those words.
I soon started talking passionately, excitedly about blogging. About it’s populist potential, it’s subversive ability to turn corporate and brand name hegemonies on their heads. It’s reversal of the information flow, a mass of information moving from bottom to top instead of top to bottom, the displacement of the editor and publisher. My excitement went on in waves. People would ask “Well Allese, have you thought about blogging?” and my answer was always no. I was scared of my own voice, that it would not express what I wanted to, that I could not control it, make it say what I felt.
But I am writer or rather I write. I began at seven in the medium of poetry and have filled journals up until this point with the details of my life. Decent or not, I have 16 years of writing to name. Freshly graduated from UC Berkeley, meaning I now have time, I am committed to attempting something, though not sure what, with a medium that I love.
If you’re a writer you must write. At Blogher08, I made sense of the blog within the context of writing. “Stories” she had said. I looked around a room of nearly a thousand women and became deeply impressed, we are all telling stories, I thought. Stories were at the heart of sacred, pre-modern communities and tumbled under the grand entrance of nineteenth century objective truth, science, reason, and enlightenment ideals. It seemed to me at that moment, in the middle of the grand ballroom in the Saint Francis, that people had found the most democratic medium to revive one of our oldest, most revered traditions, the art of the story. Blogging is a way to entwine lives across a vast technological void.
I am quite excited to join.
