--{ revising blogs }------
So I've been revising one of my blog entries a bit, this one on my last
week-and-a-half. But that's not new -- I actually do a bit of revision to
my entries, though usually they're more typographical than substantive.
Occasionally, however, I do add something substantive.
The problem
with the blog format is that there's nothing to indicate this. Nothing
says "originally posted on [date x] and lasted edited on [date
y]."
Casey doesn't like this much. "[I]t's like authors replacing
all the early editions of their works with new versions," he says. And
Diana had
similar worries, too, when she wrote about how weird it was that
Blogger Pro allows users to backdate posts.
I hadn't considered
unseen revision a problem before, actually. I think a large part of my
nonchalance is that I still haven't gotten around to thinking of this as a
diary, with its dating/archivist aspect and all.1 I mean, I
kind of do,
but not entirely, because the structure of my web page, for so long, has
been more focused on topic-based entries.
See, I used to write on
a single subject, edit it for awhile, and then put it up on the web. It
usually took about a week for it to settle completely into "final form,"
and it still takes about a week for any blog entries to truly settle into
final form. The point of it wasn't to be a published piece, but, rather,
to provide a (somewhat) dynamic window as to what I thought about a
particular topic during a certain period of time. It's the approach of
older pages, the "home page" approach, I'll call it. Where everything on
a page -- the links, the bookmarks, the about-me's, and even many of the
writings -- were considered what the page's owner "was about" at the time.
No one gets worried when someone redecorates her house, right? Similar
here.
But then web pages became more publication oriented, I think.
You see less and less of the "collection of links" out there (at least in
terms of the regularly maintained pages), and more and more of the daily
journals/blogs/etc. Tools like blogger and livejournal and stuff make
that way easier.
Me, I only started using Blogger because I knew I
wouldn't have telnet access at work, thus making it difficult for me to
create the more topic-focused pages that my web page used to center
around. Blogger was just the workaround that I'd decided
upon.2
Dinosaur that I am, I still kinda have a bit of that "home approach" in
me.
It makes sense, though, these concerns of Casey and Diana.
Because under the publication model, all this revising is a bit
disturbing. Which version is the reader reading? How different is it
from the older version? And is there anything getting inadvertently lost,
or even being intentionally hidden, here? Yes. Worries.
But if you
think of each entry (or at least some entries) as supposedly reflective of
what someone wants their virtual "home" to be (i.e., a comfortable place
for themselves at any given period of time), then this revision makes more
sense, sorta. I'm just rearranging stuff to make this place more, well,
me.
In a more general sense, though, I totally understand how
disturbing the ease of revision, and the ability to erase or omit any
traces of revision, can be. I remember going to a literature museum in
Japan, and seeing all the old page proofs and author edits, and thinking,
"You know, we're not gonna see many of these anymore. Not like the ones
I'm seeing preserved in this museum." Who saves all their drafts? So
much easier to copy over them, erase the old.
I am also reminded of
this discussion in my civil environmental enforcement class last week.
There was one session on the discovery process in litigation. During
discovery, see, one side can sometimes obtain earlier drafts of documents
from the other side, especially when those documents are co-produced by
the opposing counsel *and* their expert witnesses. To get around this,
said the lecturer, some firms have started live-editing documents such
that the counsel and the experts revise each others' stuff and no actual
"drafts" are produced. I'm not sure what the implications of this are,
archivally speaking, but it sure was
fascinating.
Some snippets of Casey's response, and
mine:
> I remember you telling me that you were
> putting some
of this stuff up on the web so
> that you wouldn't have to write the
same
> thing to all your friends; if something exciting
> happens,
you can write it out once, and we
> can all read it, and it saves you
a lot of
> duplication of effort. ...
>
> But you can't make
substantive changes in
> letters.
That's true, but let's look
at what I do sometimes do with letters. Sometimes I tell a friend a
particularly elaborate story over email, a story that I later decide is
worthwhile to send to some other friends. What I'll do then is
cut-and-paste it into another letter, and oftentimes revise it, or add
details that I only later remember. Because it's often easy to miss
things the first time. I'll usually add a note saying "cut-and-pasted
from another email, with revisions, but not always. You've probably even
seen me do this before.
The point of it is that the original friend,
the friend who got my first letter, probably got the roughest version of
my story. That friend might later on receive it yet again as part of a
cc:list, too, if I'm forgetful about whom I'd originally sent the story
to. And the second story would be somewhat different.
This is
similar. Someone who read my page earlier would see the roughest version
of an entry, and a later reader would read a more revised version, and so
on and so forth. The basic gist of it would stay the same, but it gets
revised over time, and eventually, it kinda crystallizes.
Also:
> An addendum. You know, when you revise
> a Microsoft
Word file, it doesn't just save a
> snapshot of the document - it
saves all the
> changes you've made. Anything you've
> added or
cut out is in there somewhere (or
> so I've been told). You can't see
it when
> you print it out, but the file itself will get
> bigger
and bigger the more you work it
> over... it's like a typewritten
document with
I've actually noticed this (and a bunch of people I
know have noticed this as well), which is why I used to erase older
versions of documents and save afresh, because the originals get too big
and unwieldy. This became a big issue when I was writing my dissertation,
because I just didn't have room for the really big multi-drafted files. I
expect this might be the case for people who write actual Really Long
Works, like novels, as well. But maybe not, now that space is
cheaper.
And the quote from Glenn MacDonald:
> In catering to the
writer's impulse to revise history, we have
> destroyed the reader's
ability to understand it.
But again, it depends on how you
understand the nature of a page to be. The destruction only occurs when
you perceive it as having a historical element, as documents do. But if
you don't, if you see it as a more dynamic thing, then no such
"destruction" has occured. There is no record of what my office looked
like a week ago, or two weeks ago, or a month ago. And it's changed,
definitely, over all this time. Does this change an outsider's ability to
understand my office, and what it means about me? Not really, I don't
think. They'd still come in and see that I (a) am lazy about getting the
maintenance people to remove the spare monitor from my room, (b) take
digital pictures and print them out, (c) leave my gym clothes lying
scattered about. This could change tomorrow, or the day after, and there
would be no record of the way it is now.
As such, I guess constantly
revised web pages are somewhat akin to performance. I mean, not that I go
to plays and stuff much, but each night's performance is often different
from the others, and a viewer of Tuesday night's play wouldn't see what
Monday night's play was like, and a viewer of Monday night's play wouldn't
see what changed in Tuesday night's play.
I bet those cyber-theory
people have tons of things to say about
this.
Even more:
> Of course you can
re-write and re-send old
> letters, but you don't destroy or change
the
> old copies in the process.
No, but is there any practical
difference for the reader of a new version? I mean, if Gina gets Story
1.1 after I send you Story 1.0, Gina will still only see Story 1.1. Story
1.0, the one that you received, will be practically non-existant to her,
expecially if I never get around to telling her that it existed.
>
But my practical objection here is that I'm
> keen to discuss the
events of last weekend,
> and I'd rather talk them over in a
>
non-ephemeral medium.
Well, if *that's* the practical objection,
then there's always email. Which I promise to write soon. Really.
;)
> Remember "The Basic Eight"? One of the
> biggest jokes in
the book is that the narrator
> is rewriting her diary (i.e., the
novel) from a
> later point of view, but she doesn't
>
specifically note which entries are informed
> by her
hindsight.
Hmm, I actually didn't read the book the same way. I
took it less as a revision of a diary (or even a diary-memoir hybrid), and
more as a diary written from a delusional point of view. More of a Pale
Fire approach, maybe.
> Some of the problem here is due to the
Blogger
> software and its handling of timestamps.
Yeah, I
pointed this out, too, when I wrote: "The problem with the blog format is
that there's nothing to indicate this. Nothing says 'originally posted on
[date x] and lasted edited on [date y].'" I'd *like* to have a
last-edited date, but I have to work with what's
around.
032002
1. Contrast this to my book and music log, which I won't substantively edit, even when I later change my opinion about a book or an album. With these, I just add new notes.
2. Casey, you might be horrified by this, but I actually remove longer entries and cut and paste them into separate topic pages after about a month or so. Like this one, for instance.