Presence in the blog writing experience
I've been thinking through this whole idea of "lived time" as it relates to blogging. For me, I notice an absence of time as I blog. Some bloggers have named it procrastination. Do you write in Word and cut and paste or write on the blog space? I am wondering? Other time elements I see include time spent writing, time looking for links, the time it takes to use the blog technology to post . . . any thoughts? I'm sure I've missed a bunch. I am reminded of these orienting quotes from Dave Abrams book Spell of the Sensuous:
"Western time concepts include a beginning and an end; American Indians understand time as an eternally recurring cycle of events and years. Some Indian languages lack terms for the past and the future; everything is resting in the present." (Abram, 1996, p.185)
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Allowing the past and future to dissolve and merge, with a focus to the imbedded presentness, to be engaged in the present moment, is to be in the enveloping field of presence. . . a place which is vibrant and alive, which melds the time and space in a less distinct way. (Abram, 1996, p. 204)
How might blog writing mean engaging in the present?
posted by Stacey @ 10:19 AM
2 Comments:
I'm not sure what you mean by an "absence of time." I'm continually struck by the way mediated communication subjects us to regimes of time, even in the (I'm supposing here) allegedly relatively free time of blogging.
One suspicion I have about blogs is their use as personal memoirs (my own included, or even particularly). I did have, for a while, a specific audience in mind for my online journal; now it's not so clear to me to whom I'm writing. Am I so narcissistically insecure that I have to write myself into the script of my life, to be sure I continue to star in it? Yick. I sure hope I'm a bit more healthy than that.
Hi. You pose a really interesting question.
When I think about absence of time I am thinking about the way it flies by so fast it does not seem like any has gone by at all while we blog. I notice right now that the clock on my Mac seems to have jumped 20 minutes in about 11 seconds. Time was seemingly absent as I composed this. This is what I mean by absence of time---as time passing. Thanks for helping me qualify that. Leder, in The Absent Body (1990), suggests an absence in the existentially embodied way that humans can be when we are perceptually focused on something.
I was just reading a paper by Isaac Catt (Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, vol. 4, 34, Oct. 2002) that suggests that the sociology of narcissism is, "human in language rather than language in human." So, this makes me think that we are intrinsically linked with our language and cannot get out of it, so everything we write is narcissistic, like a blog. In the cultural sense, you cannot help BUT write yourself into the script of your life because just by writing (using language) YOU have placed yourself in there. He goes on to write about a dis-eased culture which is interesting to me as we think about this. Are we dis-at ease and want to share that in our blog? This is particularly interesting to me because I am trying to figure out what blog writing is to me just as I'm asking others to think about it. Now, do we, as bloggers, love ourselves exclusively, as he suggests narcissists do? He adds "Narcissism is a survival technique, a minimalist strategy of coping necessitated by the social environment" (Lasch, 1984). A bit of a different take maybe. Does this describe us? But he also says it is a withdrawl from active participation while simultaneously giving every appearance of being actively, meaningfully, and caringly engaged with others (p. 395). So for some, this might be the case. but is the act of blogging overarchingly narcissistic? I am thinking not. What do you think?
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