Sunday, August 27, 2006
THE UNCANNY

There is a two-mindedness to writing a blog.

We want to remain anonymous to many, to bask in the glory of unlimited and limitless space where we may speak without worries. The liberation we experience through the process of writing and maintaining a blog is without a doubt unparalleled. There is no audience we are answerable to, no censors we must keep in mind — and particularly for the anonymous and confessional blogs — no backlash. Nothing we say can be taken against us; the blogs we own are no one else's but ours.

And yet, the act of writing itself requires an audience, invisible as it may be on the Internet, imagined as it is in our heads. To sit, and write, and "publish" as we've done surreptitiously through the blogs is to assume that there is something special in what we have to say, that there is something unique in our articulation, that there is an amount of importance in those words. And that this confession will find resonance in someone from that Internet public we refuse to acknowledge.

The confession as an end in itself is only true for that time when diaries were under lock and key, and everything said was mere articulation — not a publication. The blog has allowed for the private confession to move to a public realm. And in that mere movement, there is no escape from criticism. Or from interrogation.

The blog is and must be viewed as text — one that is not safely tucked into the discourse of the private and personal, pretending to be oblivious to audience, while unconsciously demanding it. The blog can be interrogated on the level of its personal assertions, particularly in the context of a country that requires vigilance and involvement, currency and social consciousness. When there are so many pressing issues of the day, what is the relevance of worrying about how our hair looks?

Within the blog is power derived from the mere articulation of lives, yes. But toward what end?

Thursday, September 14, 2006
THE UNHAPPY

Elsewhere in the world — in China, for example — governments fear blogs and close them down; in the United States, many blogs have been monitored since 9/11. While that is an impingement on human rights, it is also proof of how something so personal is political. And how blogs can change minds, and the world beyond it, precisely because the freedom within it allows for more than just the confessional.

While it's easy to generalize about my generation's entrapment in the confessional blog, many have in fact started to use this form to consciously assert the personal as political. While speaking of issues that seem to be self-centered as well — experiences of a flash flood, an academic encounter, a rally — these blog authors are able to shift from the personal to that which dictates this mere articulation: the political.

None of what we say is only release, nothing is free from criticism, and no one is free from interrogation. The moment a blog is published, it involves itself in the discourse of writing in this country, one that is, to begin with, wrought with the discourse of the personal and political, and the refusal to admit that they are inextricably tied.

But these political bloggers of my generation are few and far between. And that is the saddest thing.

Friday, September 15, 2006
ANOTHER ENDING

I wonder sometimes, what was that girl like who thought productivity meant consistently updating her blog? Who thought her own suffering was the most important thing? Who lived in her head and thought that she was all-important? Who could justify her self-centered concerns and confessions by the fact of her broken heart?

And then I think: that was a girl whose politics became the personal, and whose life was being defined by emotion. That was a girl who had nothing better to do, and who wasted time and money to heal herself through the blog, as if articulation was all that she needed, as if a broken heart was a matter of life and death.

At that time the self, my self, was all I had going for me; and it was that inch of the Internet that my blog occupied — anonymous as it was — that told me I existed and I was fine; that allowed me to live in a tiny little world where only I mattered. That this was also the time when activists started being killed and disappearing, when the Philippines sank deeper into poverty by the day, was irrelevant and unimportant.

Then, I didn't deserve to have the freedom of the Internet and the skill of writing in my hands.

Now that's a girl — and her blog — worth deleting.

The author is finishing her thesis for an M.A. in Philippine Studies at the U.P. Departamento ng Filipino at Panitikan ng Pilipinas. She does freelance writing and editorial work on the side. Much of her time is happily devoted to teaching writing and literature in the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University.