"Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down -- he also finds that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefor he should write it down."-Mark Twain, as recorded in the diary of Mrs. James T. Fields, 28 April 1876
I've been fiddling around with this blog for half a year now, and I am still struggling with what to make of it. As it is, it's not really a marketable product. Any particular topics that it covers -- cooking, life in the theatre, complaining about kids these days -- come with no organization, no regularity. And those topics are all buried within the minutiae of whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. So then, it seems that this blog is a personal journal that just happens to be open to readers.
But if I am going to use it to talk about my life, as I live it, then what should that be? Until now, I've tried to avoid any references to my gender or class or race or any other such characteristic as much as possible. No name, just a pseudonym! Never a single picture of myself! I don't want to sell myself by my labels or my charming appearance -- and I'm quite charming, let me assure you. Somehow, I have this vague ideal of being wanted for my words and personality (in that order), not because I, myself, am a good product. But why should anyone be interested in this anonymous nobody, when there are so many others out there who are so much more openly personable, so much more enviably cooler?
And then I remember why I'm on the internet in the first place.
I came around to the internet through the geek door during the mid-1990s -- after the more hardcore nerds had been there for a while but before the mainstream took to it -- just as things like actual paper newsletters were dying out as the crowds moved to message boards, where information could be gained instantly (and for free) and socializing with the like-minded and like-interested could happen without having to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to a convention. That was back when you weren't told to use sensible caution when meeting someone you'd gotten to know over the internet, just in case they might not be who they said they were, but when you didn't put your name or location or any identifying characteristics out there, let alone offer to meet someone without being accompanied by anything less than an armed bodyguard, because the person on the other side of the screen was almost definitely a pedophile rapist axe-murdering serial killer.
Obviously, that did put a few dampers on getting to know your fellows online, and let's not pretend that we weren't as young and stupid then as the young and stupid are now. There was social drama, just as you'll have with any gathering of people, especially a gathering that persists over a long period of time, and so, so many bad decisions. But the drama wasn't an integral part of the experience and it was a relatively open society, and as you got to know people better over time, you'd start to trust that your friends weren't serial killers.
For me, it was Les Miserables, with the website for the musical then hosting a set of message boards for discussion about the show and its source, related user-run text-based roleplaying games, and general chatting. I fell in with some young bucks who were fans of the musical but particularly disposed toward the original novel (in all of its 1100-page Romantic glory), the historical/political context of the story, and the current state of society/politics in the world. Unlike those notorious AOL chat rooms, with their endless litanies of "a/s/l?" and "hi is anyone here?" and "dicks dicks dicks dicks ;D" -- which I'm able to describe because yeah, I was there, too -- this was a self-selected group, with built-in common ground, but a very diverse make-up. And basically, it was the great thing of having another social circle -- people I didn't go to school with or work with or have any obligation toward, but simply whose company I enjoyed.
Back to my laughably insufficient summary of internet cultural history, though, messageboards eventually fell out of favor with a number of the more socially-oriented internet subcultures, and by the early 2000s, the online journaling sites were the places to be. Does anyone else remember the spread? LiveJournal, DeadJournal, InsaneJournal, GreatestJournal, Inksome, Xanga, Diaryland... It was a perfect place for, again, gathering people of like interests, being able to easily share fan-generated writing and artwork with a large crowd, both personally known and not, and to have discussions about it and, by and by, discussions about other things that had absolutely not a thing to do with the original topic.
The range of about 2005-2010 was probably my favorite time on the internet. There was a thriving online journal subculture, accommodating special interest communities and text-based roleplaying games and general socializing, with people's styles ranging from short entries that were shot off in a minute (which one might now call Facebook status-esque) to more long-form, formal essaying. And what I loved best about it was how you might start tracking a person due to a story they wrote based on a Japanese cartoon or a pretty picture of a dragon that they drew or a delicious (and entertaining) recipe for cupcakes that they shared or a witty comment posted to the entry of a mutual acquaintance -- but then you might discover that you both loved the same obscure French medieval poet or they lived in a city that interested you or they were gay and you thought that maybe you might be, too, but you'd never known another person who was, not for sure, not for real, and oh god you weren't the only person in the world who felt the way that you did. And whatever the reason, it might end up that what was most important wasn't what they could make for you to enjoy or help instruct you what to do, but that you could hear about their spontaneous, uninformed reaction to the latest movie that was out or commiserate about having way too much homework or laugh in despair over the current horror story about their boss.
In other words, you could be friends. Or not even friends, but you might just have someone whose life you followed, without ever sharing an actual one-on-one conversation. And that could happen with anyone. From anywhere. And without the necessity, or the baggage or the burden, of a common workplace or shared acquaintance or anything like geographical proximity. You somehow just... found people.
Around 2010, there began to be a fracturing. LiveJournal, which had emerged as the dominant force in the online journaling scene, began going more mainstream, growing less friendly toward the rag-tag fandom geeks that had made it their home. A lot of people became uncomfortable there, and people splintered off to either the micro-blog service Plurk or the more old-school, but decidedly fandom-friendly, Dreamwidth. It was a gradual shift, though, as LJ's policies and services grew more hostile toward and less useful for many people who had used the site for years, so there wasn't any single exodus and, instead, there's now a diaspora of sorts across Plurk and Dreamwidth and tumblr for those who like to keep an internet-based social circle that might develop into friends whom you spend time with offline, but who are most definitely separate from those you initially met IRL and now spam your Facebook feed with e-mail forwards that you thought went out of style in the mid-1990s.
And all over the internet, as everything grows more mainstream, people are locking their doors. With good reason, to be sure. There are horror stories of employers digging up dirt on people and demanding passwords. And with all of the people who are online today, it does make sense not to put anything onto that network of tubes that would be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands. But it does sadden me a little, to try to browse through personal journals and micro-blogs, only to find "private" and "locked to friends" all over the place.
Then there's the opposite end of the spectrum, where you and/or your writing become a product that wants to reach as many people as possible. You want to get hits, be popular. And while I wouldn't have any objections to being internet-popular -- I mean, let's be real now -- thinking this over, I suppose that that isn't my goal.
I want to reach people because I think that people are interesting and have a lot to learn from each other -- not just because of any skills they have to offer, but just by virtue of them being other people. I want to have conversations with strangers who might eventually become friends. I want to maybe write something that someone reads and never talks to me about, or who never talks to me at all, but maybe it helped them, in some little way.
Yesterday, I attended a talk with writers David Henry Hwang and Ha Jin. It was pretty fabulous, to say the least, but I was most struck by something that was said during the final section, when the floor was opened up for questions. Someone asked the two if they felt that they were living the American Dream. Ha Jin, who is native to China and didn't come to the United States until he was nearly 30 years old, replied that he hadn't grown up steeped in that mythology and it wasn't something he could really identify or identify with. But he said that he had found something in the United States, and that was the freedom of an honest life. It was the freedom to live honestly as an individual, to say and do true things without fear. It might not be the American Dream, but it was something that he had found in America and that he treasured.
That struck me then, and it's still resonating within me now.
So that will be my goal. To live an honest life. And with that, I've found the purpose of this odd little thing that I'm using right now. I'll probably still save the charming pictures of myself for Facebook and friends-locked posts to my personal journal, and I don't plan on adding a pithy collection of labels to my "about me" page (hold me to that when I sell out someday), but if I am going to be true to my supposed principles, then what should be here should be an honest life.
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