I keep tinkering with my blog, and this stems from an evolving sense of the point of this blog, and of blogs generally.
Looking back on some of my earliest rants, I see that I was personal, and reading them now makes me wince (a little like watching an interview of Anne Heche shortly after she had broken up with Ellen Degeneres). While I wanted to give my entries a personal touch, perhaps I was giving away too much information. I am not vulnerable in the sense of an aspiring politician who tries to suppress the details of a sordid past. I have no such aspirations. Nevertheless, the disclosure of too much personal detail may have been distracting, and it may have undermined my earliest aims.
1. What did I hope to achieve by being so personal?
2. How have my aims for this blog changed?
3. Have I learned anything of value about this unexpected variation on the diary/journal as a medium of expression?
1. Initially, I think I was aiming for “authentic.” Or “credible.” Online, most people don’t care about official transcripts or academic credentials; browsing is entertainment (even when it claims to be informational), and a blog is only good so long as it entertains. Only the blog can confer credibility upon the blogger; extraneous qualifications are meaningless. For me, one of my extraneous qualifications is experience (admittedly idiosyncratic and highly personal). Naïvely, perhaps, I had thought that sharing such experience would help to establish credibility, at least among those readers I hoped most to engage. But, like Anne Heche, my personal disclosures were more an invitation to voyeurism and to savour the guilty pleasures of tabloid-style concerns. I will keep such rants posted, if only for the purpose of illustrating the evolution of my blog. I had also reasoned that an open display of my vulnerability might encourage readers to feel more at ease. Again, reflecting on experience, I have found that people are responsive to me and willing to share with me when they realize both that I am fallible and limited, and that I freely acknowledge my shortcomings. However, this openness occurs face-to-face, where I convey a million non-verbal indications that work to earn trust and confidence. On a blog, there is only the text and a few photos. I wrote my early rants with unrealistic expectations about how much one can communicate on a web page.
2. Having started with some overly personal declarations, things began to change more radically in January. I had just completed a course on the problem of using faith-discourse in the public sphere and was starting to read Lonergan, whose Method in Theology has something important to say about this issue. The problem I mentioned before (the awkwardness of personal disclosure) is amplified when the broad topic of a blog is theology. When acquaintances ask what I do with myself, and I tell them I am studying theology, they give one of two responses: either a roll of the eyes, or an exaggerated “Oh, how interesting!” in a loud voice. I never get indifference. Rarely do I encounter people who are comfortable incorporating god-talk in conversations about politics or the economy or more down-to-earth matters like how the children are doing in school. There is an exception: god-fearing fundamentalists have no qualms about asking if I am a Christian, but this only makes me feel awkward and then I roll my eyes.
What I like about Lonergan is that he presents me with something profound without telling me what to believe. He is concerned about process; he has little to say about content. He is like a computer programmer who makes a calculator. The programmer isn’t interested in which numbers you choose to enter when you do your calculations; he is interested only in making sure you have a tool that can help to generate the right result. This illustration points to a shift in my aims. Individual entries in this blog may be of particular interest to a small segment of readers, but the particular content of any page is merely one point of interest along a longer stretch of road. Of equal interest is the change we can see along the way. Blogging, thinking, being. These are evolving processes, they are dynamic. If, one day, I announce, like Peter Finch in Network, that I am going to stop blogging, but go on making later entries, then, clearly, I have changed my mind. You infer this, not because I wrote an explicit statement, but because you have observed a progression of entries which reveals more than my statement intentions.
The great appeal of Lonergan is a prescient statement near the end of Method in Theology. He died in 1984, 12 years after writing this work, but his ideas are more relevant than ever. He eschewed the traditional notion of canon and said that our task is to work and rework our insight, not merely through words and lectures and sermons, but through every media of communication that might ever present itself. Interesting that shortly after his death, the online experience emerged as a new way to encourage conversation throughout the world And so, the emergent task for me has become the creation of a process, a template if you will, which exploits the enhanced opportunities for dynamic conversation through the internet.
3. Blogging presents an opportunity to promote communication and all that communication enables. This is why I have introduced indexing and searching. Blogs are a collection of textual documents (supplemented by other features like photos, audio & video). Part of their virtue lies in their usefulness. Yes, many entries have the flavour of an editorial or commentary, but others are informational, and demand to be read for more pragmatic reasons. By offering as many points of entry as possible, readers can swim freely through the web (pardon my mixed metaphor). It is hypertext which makes the web, and it is hypertext which distinguishes bloggers from their diarizing ancestors. Readers no longer sit down, as they might with a volume of Samuel Pepys, and read entries from beginning to end without the slightest notion where to find the interesting bits. Now, reading becomes whimsical. That is what I hope to introduce here: more whimsy.