Look who's blogging: Online journals take over the 'net
People have been telling each other stories for thousands of years. It started around campfires in caves. ... Now people in offices gather around water coolers and coffee pots and talk about the things that matter to them.
"All a weblog does is, it moves that conversation onto the Web.
from one of my early online journal entries, "Stories 'Round the Campfire":
Thursday, July 24, 1997
Along with all this need to put my version of the story out there, I think there is something for me as a journal reader in the way the computer attracts by its dynamism , yes, but how also at some point many of us look for a place to rest, to reflect--a place with stability--and those sites which update their journals fairly regularly provide that. Sometimes we want to grab hold of that flickering screen light, hold on tight, know that it will be there to go/come home to tomorrow. Online journals centered on home and family breathe life into all the metaphors we use about the web--Geocities.com with its homes and neighborhoods and Tripod.com with its pod metaphor, a somewhat more open, flexible architecture (even with overtones of something alien), but whose other metaphors aren't so radically different. To modify Robert Frost a little, on the Web, home is the place where, when you . . . go there, /They have to take you in.
and from Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller:
Communal storytelling was a self-correcting process in which listeners were encouraged to speak up if they noted an important fact or detail omitted. The people were happy to listen to two or three different versions of the same event or the same humma-hah story. Even conflicting versions of an incident were welcomed for the entertainment they provided. Defenders of each version might joke and tease one another, but seldom were there any direct confrontations.
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