First, there was a piece in the Globe and Mail under the headline “Dear Diary: an endangered species in the age of Twitter.” Then I came across Amy Baskin’s article in the May issue of More in which she analyzed her life-long relationship with her journals, stored in a plastic bin in her basement labelled “Amy’s Memory Box.” Both stories were still fresh in my mind when it came time to decide what to name my new online blog.
Whether you call it a diary or a journal, the physical paper-using place where one jots down ideas or confesses their thoughts is often some sort of notebook.
I decided to sort through 20 years’ of my own one night a few months ago, when I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Most of them live in the wooden chest at the end my bed, along with my high school yearbooks and an assortment of this and that. At the time I counted 42. Wirebound Strathmore and Canson sketchbooks. Mead/Hilroy one-, two-, three-, five-subject notebooks. Hard and soft-cover Moleskines, lined or unlined, with or without elastic closures. An equal number not identifiable by any brand but by their colour (and perhaps the mood I was in when they were purchased, or the mood I wanted to be in when scribbling). Etc.
Death of the notebook, rise of the blog
In Liz Renzetti’s Globe story, the columnist interviewed Irving Finkel, the British Museum curator who spent a decade amassing 1,000 diaries belonging to everyone from Kurt Cobain, Anais Nin and Sylvia Plath to ordinary Britons who’d lived through two world wars. Finkel argues journal-writing is on its way out. ”People don’t write letters any more. They don’t keep vacation journals. They don’t even use pens.” Yes, yes, people are sitting in front of their computers and writing blogs, but, he says, “the blog is orientated toward everybody in the world reading it. Diaries are truthful, never corrupt, because there’s no agenda. There’s only one person reading it.”
I guess that’s always been part of my problem with the blog, as a form. Is it for me? Is it for you? Should I think of it as a branding tool? A place to promote myself? Is it an okay forum for displaying my quirks, to be goofy, or is that a no-no?
Almost two years ago, when I went back to school for photojournalism, I began my first blog. Along the way I posted entries I was comfortable sharing, links to stories or pieces I liked, but there were also periods of inactivity followed by periods of self-consciousness and the urge to delete, delete (or at least unpublish). Then someone somewhere an another blog posted a link to U.S. online journalism prof Mindy McAdams, and she put the whole blog thing in a better perspective:
A blog should not be seen as a soap box for your personal posturing. Blogs are great vehicles for sharing information and knowledge, and sharing travels in two directions. A blog is one node in a giant network of nodes, with a human being behind those nodes. Your blog gives you a way to see and be seen, but only if you use it with a spirit of sharing and connecting.
But back to notebooks
Not to get too caught up in the whole naming thing, but I liked the idea of notebook for a name because as a concept it’s pretty loose. Not a diary, but a place for jotting down ideas and, as McAdams says, sharing. So let’s just see how that goes.
(Pretend this video isn’t an ad for Moleskine – just some musing about notebooks.)
Oh, and about that other blog. Much of it you will find in previous posts, dated earlier than this one.
