Notes to myself.

Evolution of text.

Thinking, again, about what we're doing here. A couple of months ago, I reluctantly came to accept the word blog. I'm not sure what was keeping me - perhaps the nagging feeling that this whole thing was transitory - just another tiny step in the evolution of text - or, perhaps, it was simply the ugliness of the word itself. Blog. Yes, I think that may be it. Either way, I accept it now, and have moved on to asking myself why I'm still participating.

Anonymity versus authority.

A self-perpetuating system of interconnecting texts, the blogosphere nears perfection in its authorlessness, empowering the reader by stepping beyond the familiarity of authority. I exist only so far as you can trust my words; of me, you know only what I’ve told you in this weblog. While reading these posts, you are disconnected from me, unable to reference my life or previous work, relying, instead, on referencing what you do know: yourself, your own life. If my job is done well, you find yourself in my words, and exist there while reading them.

Collective murmurings of the blogosphere.

Foucault issued a prediction at the end of his essay, The Author Function:
"As our society changes, at the very moment when it is in the process of changing, the author-function will disappear, and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemic texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint... All discourses, whatever their status, form, value, and whatever the treatment to which they will be subjected, would then develop in the anonymity of a murmur."

We are, all of us, in this together. The "author": millions of hands hitting keys twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, hammering out post after post. The "reader": millions of eyes absorbing words twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, taking in post after post. And it doesn't matter under which title you fall; both are equally important, and neither really exist anyway.