...Trying to make so much sense of them will only result in one thing. Spending the rest of your life trying to remember what you were like before any of it mattered."
-Matthew Good (back when I used to love him)
***
I created the layout for this blog on the evening of December 5th. I was not entirely comfortable with the idea of only making one entry and analyzing it, so I decided to treat the space as a regular blog up until the time I wrote the analysis. This way I would have more than one entry to choose from, rather than writing something specifically to be analyzed.
Blogs are very personal writing spaces, and I did not like the idea of having one entry which was supposed to be the cyber representation of myself. Each of the entries I have written in this short time deal with different aspects of my life or personality, and this was completely unintentional. I did not sit down to write every time and think “I need to say something different than last time”, I just wrote what I was thinking about at the time (the "babies everywhere" post), or got into the flow as I went along (the "OMG HAWT BOYZ" post).
In Gusdorf’s “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” Gusdorf argues that “the man who takes delight in thus drawing his own image believes himself worthy of a special interest” (29), and in this blog analysis I will agree that I take delight in drawing my own self image, but I will also argue that I am against the belief that I am worthy of a special interest.
The fact that this blog was created because it was assigned shifts certain notions of autobiography theory. Gusdorf speaks of the autobiography as a personal choice by an author, created out of self interest and justification, often as an act of personal salvation, an act of rediscovery, and a way for the author to prove to themselves that they lived a successful life and to create a new personal alliance with themselves (39).
The motive for this blog is significantly less self-fulfilling than that of the autobiography: I chose this option for the exam merely because I did not like the essay question of option two.
My choice to add more content than was required can relate to this idea, as this act could be my creation of a new personal alliance. However, it can relate more closely to other concepts of the self which I will mention in the following paragraphs. Simply put, I did not feel comfortable presenting to someone a singular post which was to be a representation of my personal self.
When I was making the template for my blog I was talking to a friend on MSN messenger. I told him that to me, the purpose of this blog was going to be a way to organize all the websites and comics I read onto one page so that I could clean out my bookmarks folder and be able to refer just to this blog and go down the list every morning (or after midnight, when the comic sites are updated).
Many people maintain blogs with a particular theme: some people have blogs dedicated to movies they have seen, books they have read, their political views, their social or dating life, or relationship with a family member or friend. My blog has no detectable theme, and my writing and links have no theme which is to be detected by any kind of audience. My blog is not for an audience, it is for me.
The links to my friends are not to showboat any kind of popularity or the social circle I reside within, my last.fm page and photography pages are not bragging rights, and the comics aren’t to show off any kind of credentials as someone who is interesting or cool. Instead, they are a personal archiving system.
I think that this is very important to note. This blog is very obviously a self-serving blog (and arguably, all blogs are), but they are not self-serving in an attempt to convey myself as someone of special interest, with links screaming to people how cool I am, nor does this blog have a purpose to gain attention and recognition from an audience of peers or strangers. My blog's purpose is to be useful to me, and for me.
While many write in blogs in order to elicit a specific response from an assumed audience (be it friends, fans, family, or coworkers) the self-serving aspect of my blog does not lie in the positive or expected response from an audience. I have given the link to my blog to three people in total, and only because I mentioned that I was making it and they wanted to see how it turned out, or so that they could use my list of comic sites as an all-in-one archive of what they read on a daily basis. Because of this, I am not writing with any specific audience in mind, nor am I searching for any specific kind of response.
If anything, you, Professor Austen, are my “audience”, since you are the person who assigned this and are grading it. However, if one were to look at the entries, this seems to be of no importance to me.
You are my only confirmed audience, and at the same time are not only a respected professor, but someone who will be reading my blog with the sole purpose of judging and grading my intelligence and understanding of autobiographical theory. You only have to scroll down the page slightly to find a post titled “OMG HAWT BOYZ”, which is a picture list of male celebrities I think are handsome.
You are my university professor looking at this blog in order to grade my intellect, and I am posting pictures of John Cusack and am making comments such as “Friends: STOP HAVING BABIES. I don’t want to babysit them, they are fat and they smell”. I seem considerably more concerned in portraying a specific image of myself, one that differs greatly as the self which is expected in an academic arena.
The purpose of my blog is not to upkeep the “responsible student” persona and write personal-but-not-too-personal entries where I try to convey myself as being a well-read intellectual student to my respectable professor. I don’t treat the white pages I write essays on in the same way I treat the blank slate of the blog atmosphere.
This idea adheres very strongly to Smith’s argument in “Performativity, Autobiographical Practice, Resistance”, where the autobiographical speaker is a performative subject (17). I am portraying in my blog entries a non-academic version of myself, while in this specific entry and analysis I am presenting to you the academic version of myself which you are most used to. This duality of personalities also relates to Smith’s theories of “making and unmaking of identities” (31).
I think that in my blog I leaned considerably towards conveying a personal self rather than maintaining the social persona you expect from me. I am not particularly concerned with conveying my self as “student Katie” , but am very concerned with conveying a rounded image of my personality, quirks, and interests, since the blog is such a personal arena.
I speak of my love for nintendo and other nerdy things, my embarassment at the possibility of being labelled slutty because of my tomboy personality, my bewilderment at the social normalcy of having children at such a young age, and even mention the mundane work assignments I have been given. Though I don't feel right making such a comparison, I find this type of writing similar to the writings of Anne Frank which were completed before she had the intention of publishing her diary.
Her diary was personal and for her only. Though at times she would touch on larger societal issues and normalcies, the main purpose of her diary was to be a collection of her thoughts and feelings. Often she would complain about how she wanted and liked to behave, and how she was expected to behave by others. Her diary gave her a chance to embrace a self she kept hidden from her family much like I used this blog to convey a self you normally would not get to see because of your position as professor and mine as student. This was done simply by "unmaking" the student identity and stressing my quirks and interests.
In Sidone and Smith’s “Life Narrative: Definitions and Distinctions” they specifically discuss how life narrators confront two lives, “one is the self that others see, the social, historical person, with achievements, personal appearance, social relationships […] but there is also the self experienced only by that person, the self felt from the inside that the writer can never get ‘outside of’” (5).
There are many situations where I acknoweldge the self I can not get outside from. I not only embrace this self instead of the self that others see but I write for it as well. This can be seen specifically when I mention other people in my posts but do not say much about them or explain my relation to them.
Also, the blog title itself and the quotes in the header graphic (all of which are lines from a Pavement song), the music I listen to, and all the links to comics and other websites have no explanation to why they are linked to or the interest I have in them. They are just listed as "people i interact with" or "comics i love".
Additional information would be of use to an audience, but I am writing for myself, and I do not need to remind myself what bands I like or who the people I mention in posts are and the types of relationships I have with them.
In the “ask me the questions you never want answers to” post I mention a dinner at my parents house which Tim is going to attend. I do not bother to mention who Tim is or why he is at my parents’ dinner, but I do say “The first thing he said to me was ‘Fuck, my jacket smells like fuckin' booze’, so really, I haven't been missing much”.
While I would never sit down with you during office hours and reveal such an anecdote, it is an acceptable form of expression in blogs, and throughout my posts I decided to reveal the self appropriate in the blog world rather than trying to maintain the self of the academic world.
This is done not necessarily beause I believe this self is worthy of special interest and attention, but because I feel that my academic self merely does not belong on this particular medium.
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