July 11, 2014 - 11:24
well, i'll start with the 'challenge' piece, just bc i want to use that box, and also pick up the topic of the title, do a little expanding/complexifying (still don't feel quite the same to me, but it's fine, know we can't express every gradation of relationship here:)
interesting to read your piece, anne, layered in terms of time, my memories of those earlier days on web and of you, paul, others exploring that...and my own resistance, so starting with this from your piece:
"And I like it best of all that, in such on-line spaces of structured play, deliberative self-censure happens less frequently (than it may happen in a classroom or an academic conference, for instance)--so that I, in the company of others, can arrive more readily at some unexpected places, worth examining.
What matters most to me is that this process of ongoing and ever-revisable conversation becomes an open--and constantly edited--record both of the conversations we are conducting within ourselves, in our own heads, and of those we are having with one another, each of them continually altering the other."
to me self-censure was exactly the issue when writing online as opposed to in a classroom or other dialogic-in-the-flesh setting, e.g. (some kinds of) meetings, walking talks, coffee... i felt a kind of self-consciousness in online writing that i'm mostly but not completely over now, and think it had to do with a kind of frozenness i felt of those words, that sense-making - to put it out there and then NOT be in conversation with someone(s), not even know who would read and what they'd be bringing to this encounter - all this made me think too hard but in the wrong way, by which i mean trying to say what i meant often before i knew exactly what i meant... and discovering what i meant/mean has always been something that happened in the course of either writing as a solo thing, at least in the moment of composing, or conversation as a deliberately engaged thing. but with that - the conversation - the physical presence, or maybe it's the immediacy and yes the viscerality of response are crucial to the evolution of meaning for me. and as i write this i'm also thinking of others including students for whom that kind of conversation - to me playful and serious/real at the same time, and also much about listening as about speaking - seems uncomfortable, a space of holding back, self-examination and maybe censorship or at least hesitancy...
more recently/now i am more open, playful, relational and revisable/ing online, though still find myself doing certain kinds of writing myself first, in word, before posting... but what feels to me exciting and dramatic as a shift and an opening is ways of plunging into and across subjects/questions/intrigues via the web. this feels to me more multidirectional than reading a book or really anything not online, takes up a different kind of energy - more horizontal or maybe associative, curious in that way, sometimes less depth, or have to really tell myself to slow down now, go deeper...