Pay Attention to Me!: The Personal Blog

See... everyone has a blog...

The ability to easily create and publish a personal blog might pose a unique problem for scholars of the future.  To this point in history, the majority of preserved written documents were published documents.  While publication is by no means a fail-safe of ensuring documents are culturally or intellectually significant (and also generates numerous other questions about what and who determines cultural significance), digital technologies have nearly eradicated the barrier to publication.  The results, from a historical perspective, should be interesting.  I discuss this potential problem in more detail in my “methodologies” section, but the summation is that anyone can publish anything, which eliminates any sort of hierarchical filter.  Whether this elimination of filters is “better” or “worse” is not an argument I’m interested in presenting, and the answer is surely “it depends.”  But the byproduct of eliminating hierarchical filters, regardless of any value judgments, is the archival documents with which interested parties review our current cultural moment will be different.

An example which interests me is a personal blog called “Reshaped Jakie” (www.reshapedjackie.com).  Reshaped Jackie is a blog written by a Georgia woman who is recording her experiences following a diet program called Reshape the Nation.  The content is provides is not as significant as the archivization of its content.  Because of the Internet, a single person’s personal interaction with a diet program that may or may not (and probably not) exist in 50 years, is available and retained in the cultural archive.  This artifact Jackie is creating — a constant recording of a single person’s interaction with a diet program of the early 21st century — is an artifact that, in any historical moment prior to the digital age, would very likely not have been published, and probably not even have been recorded.

And Reshaped Jackie is only one example of thousands — maybe millions — of personal publications.  These blogs produce a lot of published and archived content.  How will scholars sift through the archives of the digital age?