function

It has dawned on me that maintaining a personal blog in the age of twitter and facebook and tumblr and pinterest (and so on) is BIZARRE. The Internet is becoming a hypersocial space, and the personal blog is a novelty, a vestige of pubescence, a relic from a more genteel era of friendster and online quizzes. It does not feel relevant amidst the omnipresent bombardment of information in aggressive streams and "live feeds" on screens both portable and mired in stasis. One cannot really claim to be able to keep up with the news anymore.

Originally a digital progression from the analogue diary or journal form, the writerly force behind personal blogs was a desire to recount and archive experience — both the experience of daily life, as well as the life of the mind. Much like the diary form, blog entries tended towards an interiority that was naive about the social space it broadcasted itself in. Inadvertently, the private sphere became conflated with the public; sometimes this was a good thing, and sometimes this led to undesired consequences. In any case, blogging was a thing used to express an individuality in a massive digital world — to differentiate yourself as a perceiving, thinking, feeling subject located in a new and vastly expanding reality of kinda anonymous voices. 

Arguably, this spirit of personal journaling and diary-keeping now manifests itself in spaces like twitter and facebook and instagram. As a record of daily life, we upload photographs, leave behind messages both mundane and life-altering, announce births, deaths and marriages, etc. Our profiles don't merely assert our individuality, but also reveal our personality. The spirit of the age is: we'd rather forsake our humanity for a sense of having a personality, than feel bland and drone-like. What, then, is the point of the personal blog? How does it still persist with all the funky, well-designed alternatives hanging around? How has the form changed, if at all?

I refer to the seminal feminist text by Virginia Woolf that uses spatial metaphors to describe the experience of women in literary history and practice — spaces of constraint are also spaces of liberation. Like the room encapsulating feminine experience, virtual spaces such as the personal blog continue to exist as the praxis between experience and writing on the Internet. They don't suffer from a (relative) poverty of information, but instead offer a depth of perspective that negotiates between the two worlds of direct experience and recounted memory tinted mildly by the limitations of a lingual medium. The personal blog tells us that there is a different way of knowing a person.