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I also wanted to mention about Kate Thomas's blog and talk in class:

She mentioned that one thing she didn't like at first about blogging is the ephemeral quality, that she felt she was just adding to the debris on the Internet. This is sort of paradoxical in that what she (or anyone) writes on a blog is ephemeral only in that it gets buried under the multitude of what other people write, so it remains to be easily seen only for a short amount of time. But really it's there for a long time; at least to my understanding, it's hard to get rid of something you've posted on the internet. Is a blog, then, an "ephemeral archive"? Seems like an oxymoron, but at the same time kind of fitting.

Second thing, we talked about how blogs are an improvement on academic writing in that they are instantaneous, and there is no separation of years between writing and publication. In between writing and publication of an academic piece, the writing often becomes "alien" to the author. This is very similar to we're talking about in another of my classes on Jorge Luis Borges, who writes a lot about the disconnect between the writer and his/her writing, and between past and present selves. He felt as though the writing he did when he was 20 might as well have been written by a completely different person than the person he was at 70--but also that nothing he wrote could express who he really was.

I'm wondering now if this inability to express his true self through writing was due to a Derridean sense of the inadequacy of words as signifiers, or because every second changed him into a different person. That his thoughts were "redefining" him (in the way Calderon suggests above) constantly, so he could never read his own writing and totally identify with it. Maybe this sense of alienation from academic writing is only a more noticeable (because the span of time is longer) form of this alienation form all writing that Borges felt. This is less of a bloggy question than a textual one in general, I guess.