|
||
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
||
Humor, a good sense of it, is to Americans what manhood is to Spaniards and we will go to great lengths to prove it. Experiments with laboratory rats have shown that, if one psychologist in the room laughs at something a rat does, all of the other psychologists in the room will laugh equally. Nobody wants to be left holding the joke. |
Tuesday, November 25, 1997
I'm a snob about visible counters, but I do check the access logs for this website, and it does interest me to track the level of traffic across time. I record it in an Excel spreadsheet, with graphs even! I find that when I post several entries at once, the most recent one gets about twice the hits of the one before. Not everyone reads every precious word I write! This tempts me to cover all the time in one massive entry, but my sense of structure wants the days broken out.
I was watching Daddy Longlegs earlier tonight, in wonderful letterbox format on the American Movie Classics cable channel. Fred Astaire is so great, and I like the Johnny Mercer songs. I even like the book the story came from, an epistolary novel by Jean Webster. I've seen the movie many times, but I never noticed before how Leslie Caron's character was vamping Astaire during the college scenes. Tonight I was also noticing the cool 50s modern decor that Astaire has in his office. Danish Modern is the next big thing!
In an endless chain of self-reference, Luke talks about me reading his journal and him reading mine. But I link to him more often.
In other local journal news, Wally Glenn hasn't updated for quite a while, because he has been reporting on and working at a local comedy competion. The image of him as the score keeper is kinda scary!
This is a slightly adapted version of a letter I sent to diary-l last night. A grad student is writing or proposing to write a thesis about the online journal phenomenon. I've anonymized her bits, since I don't have permission to quote her:* * * * * * * *
Electronic communication (the "mode of information") has caused a shift in our perception of reality which, understandably, leads to new perceptions of individual identities.
I'd like to suggest to you, XXX, that this isn't a new phenomenon unique to online journals. It has a precursor in the perzine (personal zine) from traditional science fiction fanzine fandom.
Fans write zines that are only about themselves and their doings. This is usually an extension from the "sercon" zines (serious content) that were about book reviews, sf news, club news.
These zines are responded to by their readers in locs (letters of comment). In fact, if you don't loc or trade your own zine, you probably don't continue to get the zine. That's what they mean when they say the price is "the usual."
These zines are a way that people (located far away from each other) become known to each other in the fannish world. Reputations are made and broken. Feuds and spats develop.
There are even fannish fictions where fans are depicted as characters, doing things they never did. A seminal zine from the fifties depicted a journey made by Walt Willis, a british fan, to the US, before it ever happened!
The difference is, as Gus mentions, that the web journals are published in real time. That in itself brings up a whole number of fascinating issues.
Yes, it speeds things up. I haven't seen it make anything happen that was new, of and in itself.
My big question is how electronic media, particularly the Internet, affect, alter and shape behavior. While I'm still in the very early stages, my gut feeling is that web journals, as a new mode of communication, offer a very big clue and a perfect example of how our perceptions of individuals, identities, societies and realities are changing as a result of technology.
So maybe the tradition fannish fan zine world is/was a precursor of the next epoch, like Charles Babbage's computer made of brass foreshadowed the modern computer. How they would have been pleased to know that.
* * * * * * * *
I need to get the next bookclub book, Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively. I either haven't started or haven't finished the last few books, and that is not the way to participate in a reading group. We've been a mostly stable core group for several years, meeting at restaurants and discussing one book a month over dinner.
Last night I was over at my sister's house for dinner, and stayed with my nephews while my sister and brother-in-law went out to a meeting. The boys and I worked on cleaning up the Christmas rubber stamps in preparation for the carnival. I was pleased to find a bottle of rubber stamp cleaner in the bag of stamps, since it really works better than paper towels and window cleaner. The boys got into scrubbing the stamps with the cleaner, which comes in a small plastic bottle with a scrubbie thing across the opening (is that clear?).
When my older nephew J--- (six years old) started talking about what he wanted for Christmas, I asked him what he was going to give to other people. I felt concerned about this later, since he's the type of kid who takes things to heart and might really worry! But we will be able to come up with strategies for gifts he can make.
|