Personal Bloggers: Can you forget your audience?

In some ways, writing is always artificial, no? I've been steadily plowing through Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, and he claims that writing is purely a sort of technological development (recall Ong and McLuhan) that allowed societies to evolve beyond simple barter--writing was the ultimate way of holding some one accountable for long periods of time, for recording histories, for establishing uniform order, i.e. it was a method communicating between two or more people. One hunter-gatherer alone in the woods would never need to develop an alphabet!

So, in that way, all writing is inherently performative. Thus I guess I'm not sure that we ever write without an audience--we may feel that the audience is a lot more "present" in certain mediums, but that's just cake-icing. The hypocrisy (perhaps that's too strong a word) only comes out when people attempt to claim that they are writing strictly for themselves (+ their sock drawer).

Just sort of a personal aside on the topic--my (American) roommate in Austria composed her diary in what she called "pidgin German", because that way she felt she was just writing for herself--there was perhaps no one on earth that would be able to understand exactly what she had written! Perhaps that's the closest you can come to being totally free of an audience...

Perhaps writing is always artificial in the sense of always involving, in some sense, a performance. I find this no less true when I'm writing in a way that I would call "for myself."

In some sense one always writes for oneself, no? One always kind of performs words as one goes, either imagining their sounds or their ideas or both. On occasion I imagine one or another listener for one or another point, and their identities seem to shift as do identities in dreams.

I think the variety here is not so much whether one writes for another person so much as the extent to which or the way in which one imagines that person or persons as one writes.

Of course, that imagination may change quickly when one has an actual audience, and then the words change, too.

A friend of mine recently decided to stop writing in her personal blog because of the issue of catering to her audience rather than writing for herself. I think it depends on own's personal motivations, and what one's needs are. There are people who are perfectly fine writing for the sole purpose of entertaining others and thus they change their writings to cater to them, while others write as reflections for themselves. I have a friend who's been maintaining a personal blog for several years now, and his blog is basically "Today, I woke up and ate xxx for breakfast. Then I did this...and that....blah blah blah...and then I read some essays for my neuro class, and then went to bed." He says he just writes a play-by-play description of everything he does and everywhere he goes so that he himself remembers how he spends his days. As a reader of this certain personal blog, I must say it's really a boring format, and usually the only exciting things are food descriptions. Although, writing for oneself and catering to an audience don't need to be mutually exclusive matters.

So yeah, anyway, as far as audience, there's no way to generalize why or if one should cater to an audience. But I'll post what my friend who quit blogging said in her last post. I feel like it sums up this issue pretty well:

"Xanga has become way too commercialized and 'high school' for me. I feel like half of the stuff I write is merely in efforts to cater to the readers to entertain them, and the other half is a half assed, watered down version of what I really meant to write. So, here goes. I've had a good run here. But I'm out. I don't have a personal journal anywhere else, and if I do.. well I'm sure as hell not advertising here of all places."

"Thanks for the creative outlets with your confined layout restrictions and really cheesy streaming songs, xanga. And thanks to all the moments of abundant eprops and plastic comments that somehow did make my hour, my day - during that time in my life."

Thanks for all of your comments. I, too, have thought of writing as performative in one sense or another, and I'm beginning to think of it this way more and more. I have found this especially true after researching diaries for my final project, because diaries weren't always meant to be locked up and private, that was a (somewhat) recent change. So even if I write for a "private" diary, I am still writing for myself and for a future me, right? Plus, as magoo points out, writing for an audience still entails writing "for me".

Lulu, I think your first example of the blogger who writes out all his daily actions is particularly interesting for this question of audience, because I find that type of writing to be highly impersonal and written mainly for an audience. I mean, yes, as you point out, it is boring for an audience to read, but why would someone really want to read (or write) a list of her/his daily actions if someone else weren't going to read them? I find that my thoughts, not actions, are more personal, and I don't want to write them for an audience. But if I am writing them in the first place...then they are immediately transferred to writing for someone else, I suppose.

I think I'm beginning to confuse myself with this post, so I'll end here.