2011 was the year of Jacob’s Ladder. At the start of the year I set a goal of climbing Jacob’s Ladder 5000 times. That goal was completed in early November. It defined me and set a very clear mandate for every day, every week and every month. I also set a goal of a daily [...]
Why self-writing and the hupomnemata? In the paragraphs ahead I explain how writing is central to the question of personal blogging. I briefly summarise Michel Foucault’s theories of self-writing and propose how they might be used to develop an understanding of self-creation through personal blogging. The central question of my thesis is “What is a [...]
Heather Armstrong (Dooce), August 2005 :: Rebecca Blood: Bloggers On Blogging: “Some days I feel my website writing itself”. What I find interesting here is Armstrong’s reference to her website having a life of its own. Such an understanding of a blog is anticipated by Foucault in that he suggests that self-writing isn’t the revealing [...]
Self-writing is likened to the digestion of food. It’s all very well to read many books but at some point the bee must return to the hive and turn the pollen into food. Put another way we must stop eating and digest our food (what we read) so that it becomes a part of our [...]
“…the intent is not to pursue the unspeakable, nor to reveal the hidden, nor to say the unsaid, but on the contrary to capture the already-said, to collect what one has managed to hear or read, and for a purposes that is nothing less than the shaping of the self” (Foucault, 1997, p. 211). In [...]
I’ve been reading The Political Mapping of Cyberspace by Jeremy Crampton (2003) after finding a comment about one of my posts on Jeremy’s blog. Jeremy’s comment lead me to begin an exploration of the terms “hupomnemata” (self-writing) and “parrhesia” (frank and fearless speech, particularly spoken against the powerful) (p. 107). This post, therefore, is an [...]
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