Blogs Imitating Life

We’ve done a lot of meta-blogging -- blogging about blogs -- on this site. We’ve blogged about reading blogs; we’ve blogged about writing (or not writing) blogs; we’ve taken lots of different angles on attempted classifications and categorizations of the blog; we’ve talked about the weirdnesses particular to a class blog where credit and grades are involved -- the increased potential for perfectionism, anxiety, self-consciousness, and how these very writer-blocking neuroses are at least in some measure related to the fact that we all have access to a list that attaches names and faces to our blog aliases.

In this post, I want to deal with this class blog in particular, and to do so in a personal and non-theoretical way. This approach is coming, in part, as a response to what I’ve perceived to be a problem in my own posts to this blog; in this class, some of us are dealing with these materials and mediums for the first time, while others have, for example, been heavy gamers since before they hit puberty, and this sort of practical disparity isn’t something that can’t be remedied in the short term. It’s a disparity that plays itself out in class and on this blog -- there’s an obvious difference between being able to interact with the material on a theoretical level and being able to engage with it on an extensive experiential level -- and as one of the first-time contingent, I’ve been frustrated by the feeling that almost all my posts on this blog read as a densely theoretical venting of the academic spleen that comes of being in too many English classes at once.

So here’s how I think the narrative anxieties that are a subtheme of this blog are a hell of a lot like the anxieties that underlie my experience at our particular small liberal arts college. First off, the pseudonym that, in the small subset of the real world that is our classroom, really isn’t one, seems like a pretty perfect analogue to the way identity is constructed in the gossip-saturated fishbowl of Pomona College: just like we all can and do draw comparisons between a person’s blog self, class self, and outside the class self, we’ve all seen someone who did some ridiculous drunken shit on Saturday night pull a brilliant, well-articulated about face in class on Monday, and we’ve all experienced detesting a person’s in-class persona only to find them hilarious and easy-going again come dinner time; and just as we can formulate superficial knowledge of our classmates and their interests based on what their blog persona has to say, another feature of the Pomona fishbowl effect is how all of us, in response to the “do you know so-and-so” question, are almost ALWAYS able to say “oh yeah, sure” -- there’s always some superficial context through which we can tie a name to not just the person’s face, but some idea about their identity. It is impossible, in this setting, to write a piece of fiction without a very legitimate concern that the people and events indirectly represented in that fiction will be recognized by the individuals concerned.

For me, this enforced hypersocial awareness leads into a larger issue, which is that the things that are intellectually invigorating about living in an environment with a bunch of kids my age who are smart, well-read, interested and interesting, and all around active in both similar and diverse ways are consistently the same things that are psychologically undermining about said environment. In other words, it is, at any given time of day, during any given activity, far too easy to compare what I’m doing, what I’m not doing, and how I am or am not doing it to all the various doings of other students. Who’s working right now? Who’s at dinner? Who’s at this party, who’s at that one? Who’s ahead in the reading, is it taking me longer to read the same pages? On the night before the paper is due, who still hasn’t started the thing? And what are you doing this weekend? In this context, the blog is a working illustration of how, without even trying, we are in dialogue with the same texts, with the same set of ideas, with each other, all the freaking time. This plays into anxieties about how many posts I’m writing relative to how many other people are writing, how long it takes me to produce those posts compared to how long it takes you to produce them, about other people getting to my thoughts and ideas or some permutation thereof before I do. It’s the way my stomach clenches when I refresh the Writing Machines homepage and see that seven new posts have gone up in the past forty minutes, it’s how I never feel efficient enough, or like I’m always missing out on something, and how I can confirm this by simply pressing that refresh button or by reading away messages.

And this is my own very personal take on how blog narratives and identity constructions mimic real life ones. I’d say that I’m interested in knowing if other people feel the same way, but I know for a first-hand conversational fact that pretty much all my friends do, and then wouldn’t that just be a way of perpetuating the selfsame problem, making myself yet more aware of where everyone around me stands relative to where I’m standing? Then again, it’s been a rough day, and clearly I’m not in the most positive frame of mind, and the fact remains that a lot of the discourse happening on this blog is both incredibly interesting and truly helpful, and that every time I write a post I’m genuinely excited about getting the class’s response. I guess in this case I’m hoping that response will constitute more contradiction, less agreement -- I could use some good news.