Public/Private Play

Tom Matrullo blogs, beautifully as always, partially in response to my bloggerino about writings as the true avatar. He draws a comparison between blogs and the tradition of the “locus amoenus,” the edenic walled garden into which the hero withdraws for “a brief respite from the shocks and artillery fire of everyday life.” Tom’s tenatively-offered conclusion:

If one attempts to account for the enormous investment of time, energy and other resources that is currently going into blogging, it’s worth considering that more may be at stake here than meets the eye (or, I). The marketplace of messages in which we live is a kind of battleground from which we sometimes need to recuse ourselves in order to find again some notion of who we are. Because as Ariosto knew, this recreative entertainment of the self is not found in the clash of steel or the entropy of market dynamics. It comes alive in the folie of play.

That seems to me to be completely right, at least for some category of blogging. (We shouldn’t forget the teen-age boys who are blogging in order to impress girls.) And the introduction of play into the heart of the self comes with the Web: “The price of admission: Your selves.” But, while I hadn’t heard of the locus amoenus and loved learning about it, it seems too walled and private to be a metaphor for blogs. We blog in public. That’s in fact where the playfulness enters into it: we try on ideas, moods, figures of speech, and personae in public.

Not only is the Web putting play at the heart of the self, it’s also showing us — I hope — that our “real” self is not the self apart from others (taking a pastoral stroll, perhaps, in our walled garden) but is the self engaged with others.

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Later… Some email exchanged with Tom and now I am enlightened. He’s not claiming that blogging is a private activity like sitting in a garden – I knew that couldn’t be what he meant! – but that in contrast to email, discussion lists, etc., blogging lets you carve out a time of your own. You can write about what you want, when you want, and not feel as if you’re banging replies back like a shuttlecock in a hyperactive badminton game.
Halley points us to Eric Raymond on this topic, and usefully compares it to jazz riffing for the appreciative nods of the others in the band.

Categories: Uncategorized dw