I saw an exhibition today called "Absolutely Private?! From diaries to weblogs". One of my friends is a guide at the Museum for Communication, and invited me to come and see it. Two things really impressed me: a diary written by a man in a concentration camp (that was in 1933, and they were still called "Arbeitslager" - work camps - at that point), he wrote on cigarette papers and hid them in a double floor of his pocket watch. In utter desperation, being hungry, cold, subject of torture and I don't know what atrocities, he had the courage, the need, - the urge - to write on these really tiny tiny pieces of paper, not knowing if his wife (to whom they were adressed) would ever get to read them (or anybody else, for that matter). [Which right now reminds me of the poems by prisoners in Guantanamo that Judith Butler talked about in the lecture I saw two weeks ago in Utrecht.]
Second thing that sticks in my mind (and which is why, I think, I now started writing this blog myself): etymologically, "blog" comes from the word "log", ergo from shipping. In order to record the ship's position/speed/etc., seamen used to let this piece of wood sink into the water every day at the same time, and the dates of that were registered in the "log book" (ahaha!!). Don't ask me to explain exactly how this worked (special piece of wood, special construction to which it was attached, something like that), but what seemed so striking to me is this: if "blog" then really comes from "log", the custom that seamen used to have (and, apparently, "blog" was just a pun), then it is not only about daily routines, you know, the whole concept of recording what you do/where you are every day, but it's also about finding/securing your position again and again every day, it's a sort of help of orientation, it's a "point de repère". At least that's how I see it. So this is why, although I was rather sceptical/critical, at best times indifferent to this whole concept of "blog" (which is another story I might write about another day...), I now started my own.
Finally, I should maybe explain the title: Open diaries is what the first "blogs" in the 1990s were called. I like it not only because of that, but also because it expresses the paradoxical situation of diaries/blogs, insofar as they're never private.
Second thing that sticks in my mind (and which is why, I think, I now started writing this blog myself): etymologically, "blog" comes from the word "log", ergo from shipping. In order to record the ship's position/speed/etc., seamen used to let this piece of wood sink into the water every day at the same time, and the dates of that were registered in the "log book" (ahaha!!). Don't ask me to explain exactly how this worked (special piece of wood, special construction to which it was attached, something like that), but what seemed so striking to me is this: if "blog" then really comes from "log", the custom that seamen used to have (and, apparently, "blog" was just a pun), then it is not only about daily routines, you know, the whole concept of recording what you do/where you are every day, but it's also about finding/securing your position again and again every day, it's a sort of help of orientation, it's a "point de repère". At least that's how I see it. So this is why, although I was rather sceptical/critical, at best times indifferent to this whole concept of "blog" (which is another story I might write about another day...), I now started my own.
Finally, I should maybe explain the title: Open diaries is what the first "blogs" in the 1990s were called. I like it not only because of that, but also because it expresses the paradoxical situation of diaries/blogs, insofar as they're never private.
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