Ecotone: Writing About Place: WeblogAsPlace

The topic for August 15th 2003:

Weblog as Place

Is your weblog a place in itself? How do you locate it in the scheme of things? What kind of map is it on? What's your relationship with your weblog? And with those who visit it?

[London and the North] Strange that it was I who volunteered this topic. My weblog is one year old this week! I am very proud of it and feel it is one of the best background things of the last year. So this entry – well all those for this week – feel like some great responsibility: to do justice to the whole caboodle. I’m cool. But is it a place in itself? To be honest, I never even realised I was writing about place until Pica invited me to join Ecotone as a ‘place blogger’.

[Fragments from Floyd] ... But my weblog emanates from a real and permanent "address"... a term used metaphorically to locate any webpage. Fragments from Floyd comes every day from a literal address-- the same desk in the same green valley of Southwest Virginia. Many blogs' political or technological opinions and fact-streams have no bearing to their location of origin-- which may even change from day to day now that road-posting and hand-held blogging is possible. Other webblogs, fewer in number, could be thought of as "where-blogs". For these bloggers, place is central; and for some, the person and personality behind the keyboard is also integral to the information being transmitted.

[The Chatterbox] After been writing daily on this weblog for almost three years, I could say that it has become a place. Not only a metaphorical or virtual place, but a real physical space. I feel like this weblog is an extra room in my house - the one with the funky pink wallpaper - where I go every morning, or sometimes in the afternoon or night, and jot down my thoughts. This weblog became a part of my life. Here I set little tidy bits of my days, what I see, hear, think and experience. It's like a giant treasure box and an extension of who I am. Writing here is part of my routine, like taking a shower, brushing my teeth, drinking, eating, and sleeping. This weblog is located in downtown Davis, California, USA. My visitors come from different places and are familiar with different languages and cultures. They stop by for a couple of minutes and get entertained by what they find here. They can talk to me while visiting or only pass through in silence - with a smile on their faces, though - for that I guarantee!

[Bowen Island Journal] This weblog is about a place, but it lives everywhere. At the moment it lives right in front of you, little more than light shining in your eyes. Reading it may invoke a feeling of being here on Bowen Island, but it is not Bowen Island itself. It lives only on your monitor. Once I publish the words, they reside as tiny 1s and 0s on a server in Vancouver. When you reach them via a URL they fly at the speed of light to where you live and they embed themselves in your context.

[Mulubinba Moments]....Like many bloggers at the “Ecotone”, I lived in many different places as a child. I have felt many times an innate restlessness, an urge to move on from the place I currently live in - Newcastle. Being busy with “child” activities and with work I now realise had narrowed my perception of the place we live in - I had lost the ability to appreciate it and my reaction was to dream of moving on to another place. Starting a weblog has enabled me to look at Newcastle with a fresh approach - to realise that it has many hidden facades that need to be explored and written about.

[ODonnellWeb] Place, in reference to ODonnellWeb? is not really a physical concept. It's mental. It's the same difference you find between Where are you? and Where are you at, man? (Say the second one in a droopy stoner voice for full effect)

[Punctilious] In that world, I, and it are unknown. None of the visual cues of age, culture, or gender predispose the conversation. There are no vocal cues of accent or idiom to define the boundaries. It is a place where I exist in a set of coordinates beyond my physical existence and I must make my mark based upon the ideas I hold and my ability to express them. In many ways it is that place marked on the map that says, “here be dragons”.

[Creek Running North] Metaphors are always riskily deceptive, and yet we cannot think without them. Put your teeth just so far apart and expel air roughly through them, make a smooth sound from your vocal cords, and then drop your jaw suddenly. Is the sound you've just uttered - "chair" - capable of bearing your weight?

[under the fire star] I think of my weblog as a window; the kind you see in very old paintings, where there is a room with a person in it (me), and then a view of wonderful things, seen only partially, outside. It's the outside - Chennai - India - South Asia - that's important, not the room that holds the window, or the person in the room. Except that the person in the room has manufactured the glass through which you see the view...

[prairie point] When I think of my weblog as a "place" I think of this little rectangle into which I type my words. It seems like I look at this side of it much, much more than I look at the "public" side where the results are displayed.

[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] Is there something special about weblogs that make them possess more of a sense of place than other online fora?

[TheCassandraPages] We’ve talked a lot in these pages about the places we move in and out of: the big natural places; the created cities; the homes of our childhoods, made by others; the found places and secret hideaways; the less-easily-defined realms of the spirit. None of these places belong to us...

[Feathers of Hope (Pica)]While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. Feathers of Hope extends the space that this shared activity has created and also the scope of our joint writing. The weblog is a place where I can write something--this, for instance--and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people than that will read it.

[alembic] Some years ago, when I was writing a thesis on urban sociology, one of my favorite “inspirational” books happened to be Gaston Bachelard’s “The Poetics Of Space.” In the many moves we made since I handed in the manuscript of that meandering oeuvre written in almost unintelligible academese, I lost my copy of this book. Every once in a while, one of the more erudite bloggers gets excited about this book, and I remember fondly my own delight over discovering that space -- apart from place -- like institutions or people, was a major player in the drama of one’s life.

[Notes from an Eclectic Mind] . . . Unlike many online journals, Eclectic Mind gives me the living space I don’t have in real life. What began as a drawing board for the book I’ve been talking about writing for years quickly evolved into an alternate dimension, a private public space vital to my days. I now feel that I live my private life in a bedroom, two closets, a bath, and a blog.

[Other Wind] I see my weblog as a place if I use the word place loosely and define it as a certain location or experience that is sought out, that evolves, that is built or becoming. It is a distinct locale. But roads don’t go everywhere yet, and I doubt they ever will. In some ways, my weblog is more like a vehicle or even a map. I use it to get somewhere in my mind, to express something, or to have fun. Sometimes, others visit it and use it too. The way I create it and use it reflects my mind, my life, and my physical place, but the reflection is only partial.

[Lifescapes] I imagine my weblog as a kind of window on our 31 acres of Texas hill country. It's my view of this place (a view colored & shaped by the views of many different places I've lived and traveled and read about), and of the way I feel about it, and of the way it seems to shape me. The window looks out on weather, on plant and animal wildlife, on the dogs and geese and sheep and gardens, and on me, working outdoors around the place, or at my computer, or in the kitchen or in my favorite chair. I try to make it as inclusive and as authentic as I can. But I'm always aware that the window is also a view IN, for the people who read the log and who are curious about this place and the way we live here. It's a selected view not the whole. A window never looks out on all the landscape. And when people try to look in, they sometimes can't see through the curtains, or into the dark corners....

[Panchromatica] - I thought this discussion interesting enough to post something on my own blog [here]. Without repeating it all I tend to believe that a blog can be a place in more than metaphorical ways. It is a venue within which we can interact with each other, create relationships and do most of the things we do in the local coffee shop or bar. They all have a distinctive 'feel' of their own too.

Much more interesting to me is why some physical places hardly make the grade!