On blogging on blogging
It's serendipitous that I discovered and decided on Bear as the home for my thinking through of publication practices. Though I'm working specifically on print cultures, there are interesting parallels here. At Bear's current scale there's a clearly discernible community of people using it; coders, hackers (and "life-hackers"), gamers, amateur artists and philosophers, enthusiastic hobbyists, list-makers, lonely souls, etc. part of an indie web/digital garden culture that I was only peripherally aware of before, though it now, quite quickly, feels increasingly familiar. Part of this familiarity is nostalgia for the early days of the web in which I came of age, and, I think, relatedly, the foregrounding of writing about the act of "making" a blog itself. Blogging on blogging.
A quick dip into the discover page reveals the frequency and popularity of posts on leaving social media and starting to write on Bear, struggles people are having with writing and maintaining their writing, small celebrations of how long they've been using Bear and their experiences with it, what they think makes a good blog, updates on design tweaks they've made to their sites or tools they've developed for the community, and even posts to say goodbye. There are also a lot of critical reflections on AI and vulnerable stories of dealing with mental health challenges.
Essentially, many people are blogging about how they feel about blogging, and cumulatively, these posts are dense with feeling, with affect. They also demonstrate a self-reflexive and critical engagement with the platform and practice (of writing, or a specific type of writing and publishing) itself, a kind of meta-analysis, that isn't found on commercial publishing platforms like Substack or Medium. It's the difference between a publishing platform and a blog, professional vs. DIY, writing as a product or writing as a practice. This might seem self-evident, but I think it's worth pulling apart. What makes a blog a blog? Inherently we somehow understand a blog as something intimate, an online diary as opposed to a one-person magazine for public consumption. But what is it about the design, format, functionalities, and positioning of a platform like Bear that encourages diaristic vs. essayistic writing, or that attracts people that want to write diaristically?
Privacy and control are a big part of it, which also relate to questions of both actual and intended scale. Another aspect that I think is really important is that the tool is transparent, but not invisible. In UX terms, Bear is incredibly user-friendly, simple and easy to understand and use, but it is not smooth. It is not coercive. This leads back to affect and feeling, a "safe(r) space" to express oneself, and the reciprocity of affect generating affect.
I'm connecting this to my reading of Kathy Ferguson's theorizing on epistolary as a genre of movement writing, examining the letter exchanges between anarchist printers and archivists. How many of the letters related to their daily material labour; the working challenges of the presses, the craft of printing, or the collection and sorting of archives, and how such exchanges grew in intimacy, noting the shift from formal to affectionate and loving valedictions, from "Sincerely, Joseph Ishill" to "Always your old friend and comrade, Rudolf." Ferguson's reading of printing and letter-writing demonstrate how these practices not only documented anarchism at the time, but actively constituted it.
"Instead of thinking of people, fully formed, who then write letters, we see people becoming subjects within the practices of letter writing. The connections in the latticework of relations resonate among one another and produce conditions of possibility for radical politics."
— Kathy Ferguson, Letterpress Revolution
Central to my research concerns are the tensions and valences between material and relational studies of design, specifically in the context of contemporary print and social movement culture. This implies a sort of meta-analysis where the focus is on the form(s) above the content. Or perhaps more accurately, on the practices of publishing, of making and disseminating and reading and archiving the types of publications I'm interested in. Digging deeper into the questions and ideas above related to online publishing, with Bear providing plentiful data, could be a useful analytical tool moving forward.
Right now though, what I realize and want to sit with, is simply that I like writing here. It feels completely different than writing on Substack or posting on social media. It feels productive, like I’m making something.
Sincerely, thanks for reading!