Materiality and Journaling

I was intrigued by the presentation today that compared blogs with classic, paper-and-pen journaling. The presenter mainly focused on the similarities between blogs and paper journals, raising some interesting parallels that I was unaware of. I thought that the presenter did a great job of discussing the public/private dichotemy in paper and online journaling. However, the project got me thinking about my own experience journaling. At various points in my life, I have maintained a written journal, a blog, and a computer-based journal that I did not share or publish online. It was my experience that I wrote about very different things in each format.

I have always found that I prefer pencil and paper for introspective musings, while I gravitate toward computer-based journaling when I want either to rant or to recount stories about my day. Some of this difference may be due to the fact that I type much faster than I write. When I'm musing, I enjoy writing at a more leisurely pace. When I already know exactly what I want to write, I much prefer to type my journal entries. In addition, there is something about the physical experience of writing with paper and pen that is very different from typing. My experiences are somewhat related to the observations of Hayles and others about the materiality of different literary forms. However, most of our class readings focused on the effect of literary materiality on the reader, rather than on the process of composition.