On Digital Writing and the Making of the Self: The Age of the Blog
On Digital Writing and the Making of the Self: The Age of the Blog
Textuality and Autobiography, ii.
The following continues a series I had envisioned in the spring of last year, but set aside, looking at the ways in which textuality—under the forms of writing, reading, aurality, orality, and so forth—have shaped my life and the historical dynamics and patterns that might be revealed through such reflection. This particular essay and the one that will follow on reading texts has grown out of a larger scholarly project that I am working on with other colleagues and, hopefully, other scholars in the field of Islamicate studies, examining our own “digital workflows” and the ways in which digital technology has changed and shaped, and been shaped by, our practices of writing, reading, pedagogy, and so forth. I begin with an overall introduction to the theme, followed by a meditation on the role that writing in a digital environment has played in my life up to the dawn of the social media age, interacting with “analog” practices and in turn shaping and transforming them.
I was born in the year 1985, the same year that, among other things, the program PageMaker was released, beginning the so-called desktop publishing revolution, and the year in which the MIT Media Lab was founded, the Nintendo gaming system introduced to the United States, and, far less successfully given that you will have probably never heard of it, the Denning Sentry robot unrolled. Of course none of these things registered with me at the time; the first piece of electronic media technology with which I recall interacting was a cassette video camera. My dad would sometimes let me carry it around recording—whatever was happening, whatever monologue came to my mind. The true delight was in playing it back on the tiny screen, or even popping the mini-cassette into the big cassette and watching my production on the television screen.
Like many of my generation, my first sustained exposure to computing was via a boxy Macintosh computer in an elementary school lab—in my case, a wood-paneled upstairs room reached through a narrow stairway, with abundant (probably too abundant actually for purposes of a computer lab) lighting, in a school built as part of the Homestead Project of the 1930s. It smelled vaguely of dust and ozone. Surely we did more than play Oregon Trail, but that is the only thing about the computer itself I recall, the space in which we played lingering more strongly in my memory.
Not long after—in 1993 or so I think—I would be introduced to the world of the internet, first via a classroom computer, and then, at some point in the mid-1990s, our own home PC with a dial-up connection. As a precocious child constantly in search of new horizons of knowledge, I took to the internet quickly and naturally, learning to find information readily; I don’t recall anyone teaching me how to do search or resource discovery, as far as I can recall I just sort of figured it out, using whatever search engines were available back then. What I remember best was my excitement browsing NASA’s public repositories of images from their space probes: I went through a prolonged astronomy phase (the one area of childhood interest, curiously enough, I more or less left aside as an adult), which entailed building model rockets, stargazing at night, and spending hours patiently waiting for what the time were enormous JPEGs to load, praying no one called on the landline lest I get kicked off the connection and have to start over again. By the end of the 90s I was an active participant in online hobby communities via listservs and email chains, dabbling in HTML, putting together websites (at least one of which survives to the present); in 2002 I jumped into blogging, and am still going strong some twenty-two years later.
Until I started writing this essay I had honestly never really thought at depth about what might be the most fundamental transformation worked on me by digital environments, namely the space and practice of “self-publishing.” Ironic, as autobiography and textual constructions of the self have been one of my recurring scholarly interests. Even before the advent of the blog my writing style and sense of self were being shaped by digital environments, both in terms of media consumed (news articles, forum posts, emails—which tended in my experience at least to resemble letters more than, say, telegrams) and media produced. Blogging would become the most important, I think, development for my own formation. On the surface, it functioned—and for me still does to an extent—very much like the pre-modern genres of the commonplace book or the majmū’a, as a repository for textual gleanings, at some level primarily for personal consumption but also for an imagined (if only vaguely at first!) reading public. As I was working almost entirely from print books held in hand my published selections entailed hand transcription, which went hand-in-hand with the gradual movement of my writing from notebooks to a digital environment, though I have never completely given up handwritten notebooks, still using them for certain specific purposes, albeit never for long-form writing of any sort.
The blog format, when at its height as a social phenomenon, was not just a means for me to dump autobiographical musings and selected textual fragments out into the world—though of course it was that—but also to engage in conversation with other writers, with other textual selves. This was an era in which comment communities were real, in which bloggers regularly responded to one another, often with long and intricate essays and conversations that could stretch on for months, or even years. At the risk of lapsing into nostalgia, it really was a veritable digital republic of letters, and for my teenage self an exhilarating, if often disorienting, experience, an opening up to worlds and ideas and communities of thought well beyond anything I could encounter in my semi-rural corner of South Mississippi.
Around the turn of the century or so I had also begun to draw upon another exhilarating resource, the research university library, thanks to my father’s part-time pursuit of a history degree at the University of Southern Mississippi (where I would experience, at the tender age of fifteen or sixteen, my first graduate seminars in history—I loved them, did all the readings, was no doubt horribly annoying!). The combination of a seemingly infinite range of printed resources and a likewise seemingly infinite online forum for discussion was intoxicating, the evidence of which lies in the sheer torrent of posts I churned out during these heady years and into college. In retrospect, I doubt the world really needed any of my over-earnest juvenilia, but regardless being able to write and, even more importantly, to write from within a globally dispersed but largely coherent community of readers and writers, made me, I think, a better thinker and writer and reader and perhaps even person. Unlike social media, the “blogosphere” (surely one of the ugliest sounding neologisms of the digital age, but pointing at what was at the time a definite social reality) was not a twenty-four hour a day phenomenon. One sat down to write a long-form piece, or transcribe a nice passage or poem from one’s reading, and then wait a couple days for comments or responses—or maybe there were no comments, and that was alright too. Much like early social media, feedback was often intermittent, with no “likes” to accumulate and to nudge one’s writing (and hence performance and shaping of self) in some single direction. I could post my extremely immitative poetry (I wrote poetry like an AI model trained on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Chambers Dictionary) and not feel chagrined when it attracted little to no engagement.
Looking back on my early blogging, one of the most striking aspects is how frank my autobiographical content was: there are details about my life and family that I would never imagine now putting out on the internet in any capacity, much less a wide open to the public weblog. Indeed in general I have become, if anything, more circumspect in what aspects of my life I perform and display online; it is less an issue of curation and more a sense that some things, particularly as they relate to other people, should not be displayed, and in some cases really cannot be reduced to a textual trace (not by me, anyway).
That said, I am glad that this archive of my writing has survived (and really need to properly archive it for the long-term), not because there is much if anything of any great profundity or sharp insight in my original compositions (indeed, a lot of it is deeply embarrassing) but because it is a good snapshot of both my own intellectual, spiritual, and political development and an archive of the age and place in which it was produced. Yet as I was skimming through blog posts from the ‘00s while writing this essay, every single link I clicked on led to a digital dead-end: defunct websites, defunct platforms, posts recoverable only via Archive’s Wayback Machine. In cases where a blog has persisted to the present it has either mutated—my own personal blog is now exclusively a platform for either my longer-form translations and introductions to Islamicate texts or for my poetry—or feels much lonelier, the comments section inevitably empty, the republic of digital letters reduced to scattered outposts. But I digress.
Over time the practice of blogging shaped my own sense of self—my sense of who I was, what I believed, where I belonged in cultural and political and even social terms. I would not say that I read in a performative manner—I had the incredible privilege of reading pretty much whatever I wanted, be it a Russian novel or a grammar of Old English—but blogging certainly did give me a platform to make use of my reading, to take passages and ideas and lines and poems from the many volumes I consumed as a teenager and young adult and make them my own, and to do so with a reading public in mind. To be sure, the internet was far from the only way I processed and made use of the things I read. When I was fifteen or so I made a visit to William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and saw, to my delight, the room in which he had penciled out the outline to one of his novels in progress. With this authorization in hand I took to writing on the walls of my bedroom, passages and poems I loved, carefully inscribed in my (at the time!) neat miniscule script, most densely around my reading chair in one corner, but in time spreading all over the walls of my room. At the same time, I filled notebooks with selections and quotes and my own commentaries on texts, all written long-hand, a practice I kept up well into the 2010s though have since pretty much entirely abandoned.
The genre of textual selection and compilation is a very old one, as noted above. In Islamicate traditions there are several permutations of what is basically the same idea, a “library between two covers,” though the details vary, some manuscripts of a compilatory nature containing entire texts, but many, much like my own youthful (and more mature) blogs consisting of selections, snippets, fragments even, which might have been assembled haphazardly or through an intricate textual architecture, most often somewhere in between. While the motivations and uses of these texts certainly varied, I think we should see them as self-making practices very much like my own practice of blogging and notebook writing, a display of who the author-compiler was via his engagement with existing texts, the logic of his selection, framing, exclusions, and so forth. I did not record or reproduce every book I read, but had a particular logic to what I selected, both in terms of my own interests but also in terms of what I predicted my reading audience would find meaningful or interesting. Strikingly, many premodern manuscripts, whether in the majmū’a, safīna, or related formats, or not, were designed for the input and reaction of later readers, which they did indeed often accumulate. It is not too much of stretch to think of the page margins of the manuscript as akin to the comments section on a blog (but not a forum or a news article or Twitter thread).
These analogues are not, I would suggest, coincidental. What stands out as I reflect back on these initial years of my experience of writing and publising in the digital world is the degree to which “analog” forms of writing—and reading—shaped the digital, more than I think is now the case. Textuality was a central, perhaps the central, component of my self-making as a teenager and young adult, with digital textuality existing very much as one point on a larger continuum of texts mostly out in the “real world.” I might simultaneously post an excerpt from the translated treatise of St. Maximus Confessor on my blog and on my bedroom wall. I copied texts out into notebooks, and thence into a word processor or onto my blog. In both high school and more so in college I participated in public speaking and debate, both textual performances of a primarily aural nature, supported by—still mostly analog, physical print or handwritten—texts. Digital textuality, for me at least, was primarily a matter of “finished” texts: notes taken longhand drafted into papers, extended passages from admired books transcribed for a blog post, lengthy essays for a public audience (some things have not changed), long comments on someone else’s blog or website. The performance of the self that took place under these forms was less exploratory and more refined and carefully crafted (though also sometimes a great deal more frank and earnest) than tends to be the case today.
Of course this would all change—the digital world and the sorts of self-making that take place therein has become a very different place, and encompassed much more of life and practice, than was the case twenty or fifteen years ago. That phase of my life will be the topic of another essay, in which I’ll also take up the question of reading per se and the not-so-positive effects digital transformations have had on it, for myself anyway. I’ll leave you for now with a passage, from the works of the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel, that appears on the final post of my first blog, before migrating to Wordpress; it is indeed apt, and we will in time return to the diagnosis of technological modernity and what, if anything, we can do in digital spaces to mitigate the harms.
There are many reasons for this regrettable state of affairs; one of them no doubt is the gasping, hurrying rhythm of our lives; I am not referring only to the relative absence of true leisure today, but also the increasing incapacity even of genuinely philosophic minds to follow out a long continuous task, the sort of task that requires perseverance and a good wind, in the long-distance runner’s sense. Every student today is forced to get his results as quickly as possible, no matter by how many improper short cuts, so that he can get his degree or his doctorate and land his job. The results of scholarship are measured by a temporal coefficient; the point is not merely to get one’s result, but to get it in as little time as possible. Otherwise the whole value of one’s researches may be called into question, even the possibility of earning a modest livelihood may be swept away. This is a very serious matter, for such conditions are at the opposite pole to those required for the real flowering of the intelligence, in the richest sense of that word.
Gabriel Marcel, Mystery of Being