As I’ve been improving this current iteration of my Web site design, I’ve been ruminating a great deal on the role of blogging and personal publishing and what role it plays in communication and careers. I’ve blogged in the past, and will do so more in the future – but am hesitant.
It’s not just the full time commitment of graduate school. It’s not that I don’t have things to say, or ideas that I want to share – although truthfully, with tools like Tumblr which facilitates all kinds of sharing of content (images, music, text, video etc.), sharing is less about being trapped in a browser window, and more about tools that facilitate the sharing everywhere (bookmarklets, mobile, ubiquitous computing, and so much more) rather than being limited to one site or blog. This raises huge issues as social networks continue to segment and splinter our digital identities. It’s great for enriching our lives, but one wonders if a proliferation of new sources to archive causes problems – another site to have to dig through is not always the best solution.
But this isn’t about technology – it’s about why I don’t write, and in this case, write in longer forms online.
It’s not that I don’t like to share what I feel – although with Facebook privacy scandals, it’s good that people are now questioning what online privacy means and how to ensure basic concepts of consent stay relevant in the face of changing moral views of sharing. While I’ve always had puzzlement towards the trend towards oversharing of personal information to people who don’t need to be recipients, I do have a commitment to a reasonable about of transparency. For me, thought, the underlying reluctance to write online stems from something more personal. I grew up with a writer in the family.
First, a backgrounder. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a writer – indeed, it’s one of the few careers I’ve ever wanted to be, and something I felt deep in my core. I always did well in school when writing happened (both in English classes and general humanities), and always seemed to have a facility with words that meant that the output of what I created wasn’t clear, but it was imaginative, personal, and memorable. In high school, while I still maintained excellent grades in a variety of English classes, I also started to drift away from the written word, focusing more on art and music. Although I wasn’t anything fantastic, I lived for my concert band classes – due in part to the enthusiasm of learning a new instrument – the French horn, which hopefully I’ll pick up again someday. When I got to university, I started studying other things like philosophy – once I knew there was a name for what that was, I was pretty much hooked on it as my area of focus. The day I found my major program at university – Humanities and Psychoanalytic Thought – was the day when I excitedly grabbed my mother’s arm and bounced around saying, “that’s it – that’s the one!”. The older I get, the more practical I tend to be, so while philosophy is definitely a first love, I’ve found that I’ve drifted away from that as well, as my love of art evolved into an interest in design, which combines so much of what I love – analysis, creation, solutions – into a great discipline.
The drift away from the written word had another source far more influential – my grandfather was a writer, and perhaps living with one had an effect on me that I’m only starting to understand. Both my maternal grandparents were survivors – she was an orphan at 17 whose mother migrated from Scotland when my mother was a child. My grandfather was born in Gibraltar, Spain, and lived in Ireland and England. Life in England being an Irish boy must not have been pleasant at times in the early 1920s, which might have been one of the reasons why he left home at 16, and got on a ship to Canada, with no job waiting for him. He started work at a newspaper (The Toronto Star) and eventually worked his way up to the Globe and Mail, ‘Canada’s National Newspaper’. He worked his way up through the ranks up to the Editorial Board becoming the as chief editorial writer in 1960. satellite maps . Eventually he had his own newspaper column right on the editorial page which he had for decades (probably about 35 years) and only stopped because he was legally forced to retire at 75. He lived with me and the rest of my family from the time I was a child until his death in 1992.
During his life he had publish 7 books, some of which were compendiums of some of his more classic columns, some of them original works. Most of his columns were a mixture of his work as a humorist as well as his thoughts on politics and government. He would go on speaking engagements, and my sister and I would tag along to hand out the door prizes he’d always give away. What was even scarier to me than helping give out prizes on those dates was seeing his ‘notes’ for his speeches – written on file folders in large scrawls, he’s write maybe 3 words on the file folder, and somehow from that give a speech that could last an hour long. While I get that a comedian has a set routine of jokes, the ability for my grandfather to get his mind to work so well and produce what it did and deliver speeches with no printed out text still boggles my mind.
It’s unfortunate that some of his work seems a little dated, as does the work of many newspaper columnists, whose words can be trapped by the context which inspires them. A columnist writing about the changing culture of Toronto in the late 60s can be admired for his work, but it may not hold the timeless resonance that a traditional fiction writer. Having said that, his work was memorable, and if you’re a certain age and from Toronto, chances are you might have read his column or read his books. To this day, when I mention his last name (which my sister has), the odd person will ask if there’s any relation to him.
More intimidating than the output of what he wrote was the content. He was so well read, so opinionated – and so intelligent on so much of how the world really worked, that I was in awe of what he could write and the mind that goes into creating the words he wrote. While so much of his work was as a humorist, much of it revealed his thoughts on politics, relationships, and the course of the human condition and how it evolved or failed to. In some ways when you’re a child and you see a figure that you admire, that shapes not only how you view yourself, but how you view your future and what one can do to live up to a standard a giant sets. How does this affect my ability to write? On a day to day level, not so much – I still write and still think of blog posts to write. I often wonder what my grandfather would say about blogging and the Internet – I suspect he’d love Nicholas Carr and Andrew Ross’s concern regarding the Internet and how it changes our intellect, and I’m sure my cynicism on many topics may stem from my grandfather’s critique of power and politics, which was a huge influence on my development.
On some level, though, it’s hard to go through with the act of writing for me because of a ghost in my memory that achieved far more than I ever will with the written word. It stops me from writing – or rather, publishing what I write. It’s not necessarily the anxiety of influence that stops me. Perhaps it’s the permanence of committing something to paper (digital or not) that seems so definitive, and that definiteness seems more authentic when writing is far easier – like how it was for my grandfather. On some level I do believe that all of us are creative, and when we write our stories or draw pictures as children we do create, and somehow through education let that ability to create leave us – my grandfather would say it’s the education system, and he was right on that, but only partially. It might just be that when those who have a facility with words do so without struggle, the rest of us realize that theirs is a true gift, and the best thing we can possibly do is celebrate that gift without trying to replicate it – and instead concentrate on developing our own gifts in whatever form they would be.
I hope to eventually get over the ghost and learn to live with its existence. I don’t have any celestial figures holding my fingers back, and have the will to do it, and know it’s important for my career as well to continue to develop my communication skills. While I’m not the child who grew up wanting to be a writer, I am someone who has gifts – as do we all. They may not always display themselves in letter form, but when they do, it’s important to treasure them, and not be completely haunted by the ghosts of whose who do write, or have written so well.
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