My Life Is an Open Blog

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A study center. Liguria. New friends. A mountain house, a mountain walk. A farmer's market. A perfect Sunday. Is this my life? Or is this my blog?

Sometimes it's hard to tell. Many of us who blog regularly on New Media pause to think about the question of the reflexivity of life and blogging in this social networking life where private is public and public is everywhere. Clearly the sore calf muscles, sunburned neck, full (too full!) belly, wine-clogged head, and dreamy memories of generous people, adventurous living, and a perfect day are life. Really good life, but life. They are also snapshots (see above). Snapshots in the sense of edits, clips, glimpses. The way memory works, in distinct episodic moments, with lots edited out and filled in (like photoshopping in those smudgy pixels that don't reproduce very well, as I noted in my last posting). All that is life.

And they are also a blog. And what is the relationship between blogging and real life? That is today's question.

Trompe l'oeil provides the metaphor if not exactly the answer: In this part of Liguria, trompe l'oeil reigns. Everywhere, there are painted shutters, painted archways, painted windows, even an adorable painted cat in an adorable window surrounded by painted shutters. It's not a poor-man's-architecture. Even in the wealthiest palaces of Genova, trompe l'oeil is the medium. It is fanciful, and an artform of architectural approximation all its own. Not really realism but a "take" on realism.

Rather like blogging. It's not a poor-person's-life. Blogging's not a simalcrum of life. It's not even a representation. It is its own form, with its own conventions (evolving), and its own rules.

For example, I promised, at the new year, that I would continue to intersperse informational blog posts about all aspects of new media with philosophical or theoretical reflections on new media and then, for good measure, the occasional frivilous post whose relationship to new media was tangential. I would say that in the book I am writing, such a digression would be a distraction. Within blog world, it's fine. Some people insist they like my frivolous posts lots better than my worrying over whether Web 2.0 is really sharecropping or my concerns about open access or the censorship of Yahoo! or the privacy invasions of Facebook. Other people hate these digressions.

But since the web offers far more choices than any of us can indulge, I don't have to choose between the serious me and the fun me. I know that YOU will do that for me.

It's a kind of pointillism, this blogging version of experience. Dot. . . dot . . . dot. The connection between them the dots is tenuous, and equally tenuous after them. From all of them, I suppose, one gets a big picture, but I am not supplying that. More to the point, you don't have to either. If you don't like one post, you can click to another, to someone other blogger who is hailing your attention. The ability of you, dear reader, to read or reject is merely a click away.

My Life Is an Open Blog. So to speak. Click!