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Around last August, I wrote about the fact that I was experimenting with writing physically, instead of on a computer. Although that practice didn't hold for me, I picked up writing again with pen and paper around late March this year. What can I say, it's been delightful. For one, I can write anywhere, aside perhaps public transportation where bumps in the road trip me up. Writing speed here is a big factor, but I see in a way it allows me to think. Writing on paper with a good pen, can't say I have a good pen, but a decent one, helps a lot with the whole experience to be honest. It's great to feel and hear the paper, perhaps even smell it. My handwriting is closer to hieroglyphs than the Latin alphabet, so it prevents shoulder surfing. My consistency of writing here hasn't been all that great, although on paper I could journal daily for almost a month now. The fact that I can write when I wake up and go to sleep or whenever I feel the need to, without straining my eyes or picking up some distracting tech, really helps with me staying consistent.
As we all know, there are online journal-like websites and capsules. For example, a popular one on Gemini is Flounder. A while ago I used to look at it consistently, although never signed up for it. Flounder works well in particular because it has an active user base, and it uses a local feed for everything, participants don't even need to browse other parts of the Gemini sphere. Although that poses a question if it's rather locked in, that's a discussion for another time. People have journals, wikis, or whatever they want and post them publically for others to look.
I was recently reading a book which analyses how in the early to middle 2000s, when the blog era was booming, people started to share their journals online, or daily entries, or whatever you want to call them. As one college student said, "why would you even want to write if not for others?" Sure, I think having a blog where you can elaborate ideas is great, although the format could be better. Though, I think if you journal online your whole life, with redactions for names and such, you still inevitably censor yourself. Because you no longer write for yourself, or your future self, but you write for an audience. You begin to have expectations of "oh, I wonder how will X react to Y." Even if one doesn't realize it, it's still an issue because it's been proved that humans begin to censor themselves once they feel watched. Obviously, this is in any social environment and in some it might be good because rules of the specific group, and so on, but in a journal it's a whole different story. Instead of writing to better understand ourselves, you begin to write for an audience which reads your journal. You inevitably want to be rather entertaining, post updates frequently, and you begin to write for others, not for yourself. The college students that the book focused, back then, posted everything they did online on their blogs, to see if it'd catch on or not.
When Facebook came along, this has been exacerbated by a lot. This is, in a way, the social media effect, where we begin to censor ourselves for an audience you don't know, want to look best and so on. If you want to do that willingly, go ahead, but I personally don't think, and I'm talking about journals here, they should be online. You begin to act like a text-variant user of a primordial social media network. Perhaps humans shouldn't have more connections than Dunbar's number.
If you want to reply to this post, email me directly with the reply or post link. I don't check Gemini that much.