Shortly after Ecotone online community takes shape, Fred First is asked to provide a history of how the group emerged, and he responds wryly, “Of course this project arose at just this time because we all had a pre-adapted desire to do it, and then we found each other!” (“History”). In First’s view, the emergence of Ecotone was no accident, and he encourages the group to construct an historical narrative that reflects this perspective: “We have to go back behind the first meeting to the places we each come from in our philosophies and land ethic and place relationship, to make the current ‘history’ seem the fortuitous and timely coming-together that I believe it has been” (“History”).
By using the phrase “pre-adapted desire,” First displays an awareness that our motivations to write derive both from individual agency and cultural context. Behind First’s history of the Ecotone community are basic questions that can be asked of any rhetorical situation: Why write now, and by extension, why write this way? In the case the Ecotone community, the questions can be posed more specifically: Why does this groups chose to write about place and why do they choose blogging? For Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd, answering this question always requires looking at the cultural context in which certain genres for communication are available and why they seem the most appropriate to meet needs of those using them (Miller and Shepherd). Genres carry with them their own set of affordances that shape what they do best and why people might choose them to accomplish particular goals.
The previous chapter examined the efforts of the Ecotone community, efforts define place blogging as a distinct genre by drawing deliberately on existing genres, by remediating the journal or diary, the personal essay, and elements of the nature writing tradition. The definition of place blogging that the Ecotone group create would seem to accord well with what Miller and Shepherd assert is one of the defining uses of blogs: to create a self and present it to an online audience. In their view, blogging is a “contemporary contribution to the art of the self,” a particular mechanism for self-disclosure that emerges in the late 1990s. Rebecca Blood supports this view when she asserts that weblogs of all kinds share a dedication to fostering a personal voice, and as a form they representing “nothing less than an outbreak of self-expression,” “an unprecedented opportunity for individual expression on a worldwide scale” (“Weblogs”). Miller and Shepherd describe the cultural kairos that gives shape to blogging as one in which the boundaries between public and private are being renegotiated, in which many people are more comfortable with forms of mediated voyeurism and exhibitionism, characterized by an impulse toward self-disclosure and a keen interest in observing the often personal details of other people’s lives. Miller and Shepherd observe that “the technology of the internet makes it easier than ever for anyone to be either a voyeur or an exhibitionist—or both,” allowing users to share “unprecedented amounts of personal information with total strangers, potentially millions of them” (Miller and Shepherd). In this context, self-disclosure has both intrinsic and extrinsic goals: self-disclosure can be personally meaningful as a form of self-expression or it can be intended to benefit others in a broader community.
While some forms of internet discourse have reveled in the possibility of reinventing an online self that is quite different from an offline self, Miller and Shepherd observe that bloggers seem more interested “in locating, or constructing, for themselves and for others, an identity that they can understand as unitary, as “real.” In their view, the blog can be seen as effort to cope with the fragmentation nature of post-modern life, “as a particular reaction to the constant flux of subjectivity, as a generic effort of reflexivity within the subject that creates an eddy of relative stability. Infinite play, constant innovation, is not psychically sustainable on an indefinite basis” (Miller and Shepherd). The social function of blogging is, at least in part, about the ongoing construction of self in response to these changing social and cultural conditions.
Michael Curry suggests that “fragmentary identities” among people in the modern world arises in part “from the proliferation of types and scales of the places within which their actions and utterances take place (“New Technologies” 11). Both the experience of moving from one place to another and of having places change around us push place bloggers toward a notion of place that is bounded and permanent but something that is in flux and something that needs to be created. Place bloggers, then, represent an effort to adapt blogging to respond to particular social conditions—residential mobility, rapidly transformed physical environments, and quickly changing communication technologies—in order to articulate a genre that helps foster a deeper sense of place. If blogging is concerned with the representation of self, place blogging is about constructing a sense of self in place, what has variously been called a sense of place or place identity, rootedness, topophilia, community sentiment, local sentiment, place attachment (Cross).
However, putting place into the network requires it to take a form that the network can recognize, namely a collection of objects that each stand for a fragment of place experience. But how, then, do fragments of place in the network offer a remedy to our fragmented subjectivities? Fragmentation is only a problem if place is something unified and singular to begin with. However, this chapter examines how the discussions of place identity within the Ecotone community reveal that their relationships to place are actually multi-local in nature and that they do not expect place to ground their sense of self in any simplistic way. While Ecotone bloggers turn to blogs to represent themselves in the network, their blogs do not necessarily create a one-to-one alignment between one place and one self. Instead, managing a set of digital objects through place blogging offers a mechanism for constructing a meaningful sense of self-in-place out of the many places that have shaped who they are.
Place as a Digital Object
For members of Ecotone community, place blogging is a way to form deeper connections to place. To adapt Mary Hufford’s terms for describing folk culture, place blogging is a “genre of place” a “place-linked form of expression” that is “deeply implicated in the construction and maintenance of place, and in the attachment of people to places” (232). In this formulation, genres of place are “linked” both by emerging from particular locales and by serving to connect people to those locales. But “linked” takes on different connotations when used in the context of communication in digital networks where hyperlinks create the pathways from page to page around the web and digital objects circulate as nodes connected to other nodes.
When Chris Corrigan describes how he began blogging about place, he recalls how it was the power of linking in blogging that attracted him, the way weblogs “link ideas, places and people together creating communities and relationships.” But what makes place blogging different from other forms of blogging is the connection it enables people to make to place, and Corrigan imagines other meanings for “linking” that revise the early definition of blogs as primarily a filter for web links:
Instead of linking to other places on the net, we are linking to places period. We draw connections together between elements that we notice in the land around us. Barry Lopez describes this as “landscape,” when you link together elements of a territory and give them meaning. And giving them meaning is what makes us intimate and friendly with the land. (“Place Blogging Description”)
Though Corrigan distinguishes between linking to web pages and linking to places, the contrast he creates is not precisely between the real and the virtual, between online and offline. Rather, the exact meaning of place and linking has multiple meanings. Place is something created as we make connections between our experiences and observations of the locales we inhabit. In the context of another discussion on the Ecotone wiki, Corrigan describes place blogging in similar terms:
But when the subject of blogging is “place” there is something else that happens too. The writer links to the land. These links are not necessarily hyperlinks or photographs, but instead are written projections of the writer’s relationship with the land. Assembling these notes together creates a landscape, and in continuing to assemble this picture, one creates a communal relationship with the place and, ultimately with the readers of you and your place. I’m glad to see other bloggers of place taking up the thinking on this. (May 16, 2003)
Corrigan here seems to describe place blogging in contradictory ways. On the one hand, he seems insistent that place blogging is about making links to places themselves, not just to other material on the web. In doing so, he aligns place blogging more with the diary-style blog, which takes writing personal experience as it subject matter, than with the filter-style blog, which concerns itself with linking to material that is already online. Such a distinction suggests the filter-style blog is about online life while the diary-style blog is about life offline, about personal experience as it happens in real life. But as writer Joe Clark has argued in describing early weblog culture, the more life takes place online, the less the distinction makes sense:
Since so many leading Weblogs are written by folks in the Internet biz, their entire lives are online. You can write up what you did with your real-life friend yesterday, but you can’t link to that experience. You can link to what your online friend blogged yesterday. The annotated-list-of-links Weblog form, then, becomes one and the same with the diaristic form for Webloggers in the Internet demimonde: Links are diaries because life is the Web. (59)
One need not spend all one’s time online for Clarke’s broader point to be true: the more our lives are mediated by online life, the more comfortable we become making our experiences, whether offline or online, into objects that can be linked to.
These digital objects are, of course, what defines the web, what David Weinberger has called “small pieces loosely joined.” Since places, like any other experience, cannot be linked to without taking a form that the network can recognize, then “the links to the landscape” Corrigan describes must be links to places that have taken digital form. Corrigan acknowledges as much when he describes blogs as “written projections of the writer’s relationship with the land” and that “assembling these notes together creates a landscape.” Places, then, turn out to be representations of the experience of place that are collected into a particular form we now call a blog. As Johndan Johnson-Eilola points out this is typical of the texts we create online: “For better or worse—or, in fact, for better and worse—texts no longer function as discrete objects, but as contingent, fragmented objects in circulation, as elements within constantly configured and shifting networks” (208).
However, the circulation of these “contingent, fragmented objects” is not simply random and chaotic. The pieces that constitute the web take a wide variety of forms, and the interactions that happen around these fragments—what Ulises Mejias calls “object-oriented sociality”—often solidify into recognizable patterns made possible by specific structures of communication (Networked 33). Blogging represents one form that digital objects take: we recognized the primary unit of a blog as a post, an entry posted by a single author with a particular timestamp and title. Structurally, blogs are defined by the way posts are arranged in reverse chronological order with the newest entries on the top of the page and later ones pushed down until they are archived. Interaction around posts happens through comments, another kind of digital object that adheres to blog entries in its own pattern of conversation and response. However, while objects may begin in one arrangement, they often are reassembled and reused in multiple contexts, both within a particular blog—through archives and categories—as well as in contexts far removed from the originating internal network of the author’s blog. Because a blog is not an airtight container for these objects, individual posts are free to circulate throughout the web and in other contexts.
Corrigan and the rest of the Ecotone community are attracted to the particular form digital objects take in blogging, particularly the way blogs are structured to accumulate posts over time. Rebecca Blood asserts that this accretion of content is what gives the blog its particular power as form of self-representation, as “these fragments, pieced together over months, can provide an unexpectedly intimate view of what it is to be a particular individual in a particular place at a particular time” (“Weblogs”). Similarly, Hollander asserts that blogging is well-suited for writing about place because it facilitates attention to place over time, such that “the fragments from your posts will build up into quite a portrait of the place you have ties to” (“This is a related reply”). As First observes, such fragments—observations about nature, notes on local history, photographs of the landscape—sometimes can be sprinkled throughout blogs that might not identify as “place blogs,” mixed in with posts about “politics or pets or pottery, which leads him to speculate that there will be plenty of bloggers who would “find company with other similar offerings,” if they simply knew now to find them. While tradition print-based journals and essays may portray the emergence of the self over time, they are not presented in a serial form but rather as finished works. A journal entry may be a distinct piece of a journal, but it will always appear in a particular place in that work—it is fixed there. By contrast, a blog entry has an identity as a distinct object, held in place initially in the frame of the blog, but because of its database nature and its existence as a node in a network, it could appear in many other contexts.
When place is put into the network, then, it enters as discrete digital objects representing fragments of experience and information about a particular place. Like First’s vision of “tens of thousands of bloggers across the globe” creating “many, many entries” on nature and place, Corrigan sees blogging as a mechanism for assembling short-form representations of an individual’s experience of place over time. Blogging is a fundamentally temporal medium in which accumulated posts are presented in reverse chronological order in a way that represent the evolution of thought rather than a finished work. Unlike wiki pages, blog posts are generally not edited once they have been posted; readers assume that entries are “as-is” and the thoughts and information in the post are tied to the moment in time it was created. Though blog posts might not change once posted, they are in fact under constant revision as the blog in which they are embedded continues to change. The meaning of any post might be revised by the commentary of subsequent posts or by comments of other readers. As Himmer puts it, any aspect of a blog “is unavoidably altered by the addition of a new post” and for this reason “there is no completion of a weblog—there is always the possibility, and usually the implied promise…of an additional post to come” (Himmer). A blog then, is best though of as a practice rather than as a product or a finished work, a practice in which the representation of this process is part of the form. In contrast to wikis where changes are tracked but secluded in “history” of each page, blogs make the development of the blog visible throughout its development. The structure of the blog suggests that the blogger, not just the site, is being revised.
Importance of Individual Blogs
For Ecotone bloggers, the blog brings fragments of place experience into a meaningful frame that represents the self as a work in progress. For this reason, it is important for the group to clarify the relationship between individual blogs and the collective site, and way they structure the community reflects the desire to maintain the integrity of individual blogs. Several participants are concerned that Ecotone not detract from the writing they are already doing on their blog, and they begin to consider ways to collect posts of individual blogs on a shared topic. Rather than adopting a blog carnival format which is hosted on member sites or using a external aggregating service, the group decides to build on the existing wiki that they had been using heavily for several weeks.
Corrigan takes the lead in formulating some structure for the groups activities, suggesting that they post place blogging topics on the 1^st^ and 15^th^ of each month and invite anyone who is interested to post responses on their individual blogs. A link to each post would be added to a wiki page for that topic, followed by any ongoing discussion participants would like to have. Hollander describes the arrangement this way:
I would very much like to see the wiki grow to be a general forum for discussing place and placelessness, one’s relationship to landscape, what is meant by a sense of place and so on, rather than being an adjunct to the writing we do on our blogs. Architecturally I think the two poles for our writings should be our own individual blogs and the wiki, rather than having the community discussion take place in a collaborative weblog. (“Running Discussion”)
In Corrigan’s mind, these two poles are important because they preserve the integrity of his own blog while providing collective topoi for invention:
For me this will ensure that my own blog stays focused on Bowen Island (because that’s why I write it) while at the same time contributing to the discussion on topics that I care about. I probably won’t post on every bi-weekly topic, but if something grabs me, I’ll put it up there. (“Potential“).
The way Corrigan describes it, Bowen Island is its own topos, a literal place which provides a heuristic for invention, while the Ecotone network provides an additional set of topoi which prompt him to blog about his place in other ways. Moreover, the blog remains identified with the individual writer and his sense of place, as distinct from whatever collaboration might happen on the Ecotone wiki.
This alignment of place, self, and blog might suggest a rather unified construction of place. The titles of some Ecotone blog might suggest an alignment between self and place:
- Fragments from Floyd
- Bowen Island Journal
- Mulubinba Moments
- London and the North
- The Middlewesterner
- Creek Running North
- Pure Land Mountain
- Northwest Notes
- prairie point: A view of the world from a garden on the Blackland Prairie
Such titles suggests that each blog is coextensive with a particular place, and by extension, that place blogging by definition requires a place blog.
However, other Ecotone bloggers consider place a central theme in their blogging without defining their blog entirely or exclusively in terms of a particular place, referring to place in their subtitles or as one category of blog posts:
- Feathers of Hope: A weblog on nature and place, the design arts, politics, and baseball…
- Lifescapes: “Notes about writing, landscape, and life in the Texas Hill Country”
- Cirrus: “Musings on the finger lakes weather, the bioregion, place-based spirituality…or sports!”
Blogger Wendy Rogers from Other Wind remarks after being invited by First to join the early discussions at Ecotone, “I’m glad to be included, even though I am not exclusively a place blogger.” The emphasis is not on place blogs as a discrete works or textual artifacts, or even place blogger as a category of self-identity, but rather on place blogging as a practice that could adopt various degrees of emphasis, from the overall theme of a blog to one category among many.
Lorianne DiSabato describes her blogging as more post-modern in sensibility than traditional nature writing, and she tends to see place blogging as a way to experiment with notions of both self and place:
One of the joys of blogging is the experimental nature of it all: one day you can try your hand at a serious post; the next you can experiment with a lighter, more zany voice. In a word, blogging provides a forum where you can let all of your personalities (if you happen to have several) out of the bag, each with a day and a spotlight all their own. (“One Year”).
As a transplant to Keene, DiSabato sees her blog as a way to actively construct a sense of place and describes “writing about place to create a place myself” (Interview). As a result of these attitudes toward both place and the self, reading DiSabato’s blog means traveling with her through a wide range of representations, from earning her doctorate to going through a divorce, from picturesque images of the New Hampshire countryside to the backsides of ordinary buildings in Keene.
After proposing definitions of place blogging that range from the careful observation of ordinary places to the ethical imperative of ecological responsibility, Lisa Thompson from Field Notes offers a few closing words cautioning against rigid definitions:
Lisa here—I feel a strong inclination to leave our definition as loose, as inclusive, as possible. I’d prefer to draw a context rather than a conclusion. I just began to blog in August last year, but really only in earnest this year. Much of the writing I’ve done there hasn’t fit my original idea of what I’d be doing, and I’m still finding my way. I plan to keep following the threads that pull me: those that follow long-standing interests, new loves and discoveries, and those danglers I just can’t ignore.
Not everything I write about will be/is about place, or about “Inverness.” But what holds it all together, perhaps, is that it is all informed by place, by my connection to place, my embodiment in place, and as Chris so beautifully put it, in “placing the whole kit and kaboodle in the context of a world culture.” (“Place Blogging Description”)
The comment of blogger Coup de Vent from London and the North suggests that the community and blogging itself able to accommodate the fragmentary senses of place that many of its members have:
Hi. Coup de Vent here. It’s been great dropping into people’s blogs this way. I like having the time frame for the bi-weekly posts. It’s interesting that I hadn’t considered my blog as a Place Thing until Pica asked me if I’d be interested in joining in the wiki. I’m still thinking about what it means to be known that way. In itself, it also creates another place to belong. (“Running Discussion”)
By providing Coup de Vent with a term with which to identify her blogging, the Ecotone wiki provides a rhetorical habitat to support a deeper engagement with place. But it does not require place to be defined in a stable or unitary way. Place, in this sense, is one slice of the self, a filter that can be applied that presents a sub-set of digital objects which represent the self-in-place.
Writing a Relationship to Place
The first two topics the Ecotone members decide to blog about collectively offer more details about what kinds of selves they feel they are constructing: “How did you come to write about place?” and “How do places define us or how we define ourselves in relationships to place?” Of the 36 bi-weekly topics, these are the only two phrased as questions, reflecting this early period in the group’s formation when they are engaged in reflecting most self-consciously about why they blog about place and what they mean by “place” itself. For many Ecotone bloggers, their relationships to place is complicated because they have moved often, and they have connections and attachments to more than one place. Their sense of place is fragmented, and writing is one way to construct a stable sense of where they are. As First puts it, place is not a given due to how often we move today:
In our times, sense of place is elusive, a longing-for rather than a possession. We pay a price for our mobility, our rootlessness. Few have a “homeplace” to go back to, or even the pictures that Beth can hold in her hands and say “this is, or was, my place.” We create a sense of place and attach it to our present-day surroundings as a way of creating identity. Perhaps this is central: we exist in context of place, take from it our notions of who we are. (“Discussion June 15 ”)
Mobility prevents us from creating what would seem to be a normative, singular attachment to a place as a stable grounding for identity, and this can undermine our sense of who we are and where we belong.
In her post, Patricia Perkins foregrounds the way mobility defines her sense of place and of self: “Not having a place gives rise to yearning and learning about what it is to have one.” She creates her complicated sense of place out of what she learns from the places she encounters as a traveler:
I write about culture and about place from my peculiar vantage point because I’m obsessed with it, fascinated by it, drawn again and again into its stories. I once read that people write because of some lack in themselves, and this might be true of me. I have fallen in love with a place—the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts. I have given it years of myself, years of words and praise. And married a man who can’t STAND it there. Too cold. Terrible people, according to him. And so, the one place I might have claimed as my own is denied me, as long as I stay married to this guy, at least. Which looks likely. He’s a misplaced person, too. Born in Algeria, transplanted by violent politics to France, and transplanted again by love to the States. (“My Place”)
Perkin’s self-identification as a traveler is unusual among the Ecotone writers, most of whom are more interested in dwelling than in traveling, even if they happen to live overseas. But many of the Ecotone writers share experiences of mobility of one form or another, and many attribute their motivation for writing to the need for deeper connection to where they currently live.
Wendy Rogers from Other Wind recalls moving frequently while growing up in Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, having a “home in all these places, but never a hometown. Rogers is able to recognize the benefits of moving—it made her “more open-minded, more diverse in experience and thought” and “less frightened of change”—but she also recognized that each move she experienced “had an opportunity cost” that left her “slightly rootless.” As a result, she writes, “For roots I have memories, each home a different flavor, each its own lovely tone,” and she confesses, “I’ve always dreamed of far away places, places that could perhaps be mine.” After a trip to San Diego, she describes the surprising sense of connection she feels to the seemly “ordinary” place where she actual lives, and the consequent desire to write about that connection:
I dreamed about what it would be like to live that close to the ocean. Yet when we came back to Knoxville, I felt comfort at seeing the trees. Here were my trees, so many and so striking in their late winter starkness. They washed over me, like coming home must feel. I don’t think I realized before right then that I had formed such an attachment to this place.
…
Now, even though I still dream of other places, of making changes and traveling, the pull to stay and live in this region grows in me. I can think of many reasons why I’ve finally felt a profound connection. I’ve lived here longest. I spent my childhood (or at least the part of childhood during which I went outside) in West Virginia, another piece of Appalachia, so many of my happiest memories contain the same imagery by which I’m now surrounded. I’ve married a man who could never really seriously think of leaving this place. Whatever the reasons may be, a new sense is emerging in me, and I want to hold it, to know it better. Sometimes, I write it down—see that tree there, that hill, they look like this, feel like this. I want to remember each time the sense of home tiptoes up on me, each time I know that I am kin to this beauty all around me. I claim this place with my words. I am making claims now, tiny claims of nativity. (“On Coming”)
For Rogers, blogging about place is an act of belonging, and the effort to actively connect her identity to this particular place and continue exploring the emerging sense of place as it happens.
While many place bloggers write out of the experience of mobility in their own lives, many also write out of a sense of past rootedness. Corrigan observes after reading the posts for the first bi-weekly topic, “it seems as if our love of and connection to place is informed by childhood experiences.” Hollander describes his image of his childhood house:
I carry this image with me; indeed it defines the sort of place I aspire to live in. A house, not a large one, built with character and craft. Places to roam—a walker’s landscape, not one solely for the automobile. Nature, both in the backyard and nearby. Hills to climb, cycle up, and cycle down. And when I fancy myself an inheritor of the Arts and Crafts tradition, I needn’t look far from home to realize why (“Natal”).
For Adams, her connection is to Beaver Meadow, a tiny hamlet in the hills of central New York where she grew up:
I write about place, in both a particular and a broad sense, because I’ve realized that I was given something precious that most people in our culture simply don’t have. A sense of deep connection and belonging—to nature, to place, to the mystery of existence and creation: these are our birthright as human beings. (“Sunday“)
Adams describes her commitment to writing about place as an inheritance bequeathed to her from several generations of women in her family. When she was 12, her great aunt Inez gave her a “book of stories she had written about her childhood back in Beaver Meadow,” a collection that became meaningful to her later in life: “Of course I didn’t appreciate what she had done until much later, when I had moved pretty far away myself and was starting to think about my own identity and where it had come from.” Her mother and grandmother also contributed their place-based writing to this inheritance:
Elizabeth Adams (“Sunday, June 15, 2003”)
My own grandmother, who wrote me letters about her garden until she was 90 years old, and my mother, who just sent me an email about finding gooseberry bushes in the woods across the road and with whom I’ve prowled countless woods and shorelines, also conveyed the same messages about the importance of place in the midst of chaos, confusion, and change. (“Sunday“)
The deficiency Adams feels in relation to place stems less from the experience of having left a place than from the “the enormous sense of loss” she feels in “observing the changes in attitudes and destruction of the environment that have taken place” since her family moved away from their home in Beaver Meadow. Moreover, she mourns a more general sense of alienation at the root of modern life, what she sees as a “fear of nature” and a “sense of hunger, longing, and homelessness … As we’ve paved over our meadows and plastic-wrapped our foods, we’ve obliterated the paths designed to take us back to our origins and the truth about ourselves; we’ve encapsulated our souls” (“Sunday“). Adams makes explicit an important element of the culture kairos out of which place blogging emerges, namely, the global environmental crisis:
And so I write about place in the hope of awakening that inborn spark of recognition; of de-mystifying the web of connectedness between 21st century humans and the living earth; and of perhaps offering a safe passage, comfortably cushioned with words, into silence, wonder, and love. Without those, I don’t think there is much hope of awakening a sense of responsibility toward this fragile earth. (“Sunday”)
For her, the construction of a place-based sense of identity is ethically and politically necessary to begin addressing the causes of this crisis and to begin imagining solutions.
Adams confesses that it has taken her a while to appreciate the experience of place she had growing up: “It’s taken me a while to begin to the grasp the nature of the torch I’d been handed at age twelve.” However, she also realizes that the goal is not to return home to rediscover her heritage or even to write about her currently place in the same style as these women. Rather, the point is to “enter as seriously into relationship with my particular place in time and space as these women had, to learn from it, and to find my own ways of passing it on. What they had done was to capture the beauty of lives lived simply and attentively, and in doing that to tell me, ‘Here is something that will see you through’” (“Sunday”).
Hollander observes that sense of place does not require a commitment to sedentarism:
What strikes me when reading these pieces is that there doesn’t seem to be any connection between a sense of place and a sense of rootedness. Some of us are strongly rooted, others of us are given to peregrinations, yet we all write with a strong awareness of place. Rather, it’s as though there’s a faculty we’ve all developed to a good degree, call it geographical curiosity or geographical imagination. (“Discussion June 15”)
Mobility does not necessarily undermine a sense of place, while rootedness does not guarantee tophilia. What matters is the ability to imagine the connection between one’s self and where one is and to cultivate a meaningful, ethical relationships to the places one inhabits. Fred First describes the need to see places as more than just object:
It seems to me that many see themselves merely as objects within place, places that are artificial, often ugly and energy-draining, perhaps engendering a protective blindness to the subjective state in which we see ourselves as not separate from but belonging to, changed by, part of “place.” Tourist travel can easily turn place into object, and tourists can be mere objects within it. I feel more and more than even life-residents in many places are becoming tourists there (“Discussion June 15”)
Here we see the influence of the nature writing tradition in its effort to imagine place as not just the backdrop to human activities but another character in the drama of human existence.
In her post, Thompson dramatizes a similar conviction about the importance of cultivating relationships with place through writing:
I’ve come late to a love of the land, to an affinity for place. It snuck up on me while I was consumed with matters of the heart and other fiery occupations. One day I was tightrope-walking along, juggling fireballs and swords, minding my business, when I became aware of a familiar sensation. I felt a dull ache in my heart and tension in my belly, like love, but not directed at any two-legged beast, but towards the very ground. (“6.15.2003”)
But this love of place is complicated and time-consuming, more like marriage than dating, full of passion but a passion that must be constantly nurtured:
Blake says that you can’t stay in the “walled garden of the lover” forever. If you try to hold onto that fire and passion, you’ll fall all the way down to the “valley of isolation,” to cold self-pity. In order to keep progressing, you have to increase the heat of that passion with constant creativity. Like a marriage, this love of place. And like marriage, it requires art and imagination if it is to soar. I no longer have that land in Mexico, it slipped through my fingers like sand slips from barren shores. I can’t dig my hands into her soil, or smell her sweet, fetid womb, or hear the waves from my bed, but I can keep her alive with my love through words. (“6.15.2003”)
While her metaphor here is one of marriage, she is not exclusive in her place relationships since she writes about the beach where she previously lived in Nayarit, Mexico, and the place where she currently lives, the Point Reyes Peninsula in California. As with Adams, relationships with past places inspire new relationships with place, even as a one maintains emotional bonds where one used to be:
Meanwhile, I began to see the complexities of the land around me through the eyes of a friend who had love for it. I learned from him how to sit or walk quietly through a landscape and let it reveal itself. We ate cereal on our sun-drenched deck and looked up at Mounts Vision and Wittenberg and Point Reyes Hill, watched the birds come and go in our yard, saw them return in season to build nests in our trees. (“6.15.2003”)
Coming to know a place, for Thompson, is not a disinterested endeavor but is only made possible through relationship, both with other people and with place.
Corrigan and Thompson describe the connections between place and self in Emersonian terms, as a correspondence between self and place, as nature as metaphor for the self. For Chris, the Bowen Island where he lives is a “rich psychological metaphor”:
\
Chris Corrigan (“July 04, 2006”)
Moving to an island affects us deeply. We cannot escape the idea that our connections to the outside world are severed, and we turn instead to the inner connections for our reliance and sustenance. For me, physically moving here was accompanied by a psychological and spiritual inward turning as well. It invited me to explore my inner resources and creativity. And this whole place is populated by many people who have taken this triple journey inward, so we invite each other to play with the notion continually … Eventually, we take the shape of the island itself: windswept shorelines exposed to the elements, and rich and verdant interiors full of growth and solitude.
Being an islander does not mean isolation; it means knowing where your edges are and constantly creating connections, following trails and exploring details. You grow aware that the limited landscape in fact draws you deeper in so that it becomes an infinite journey through fractals of detail. The island and the soul become holograms, every part reflecting the whole and encompassing the perfect fullness of its presence. It’s impossible to live for long on the surfaces. (“July 1, 2003”)
For Lisa, the reclusive, private nature of her place fits her personality:
But informing those relationships is a tendency to the solitary. It’s palpable. In Ireland, they say that it’s the job of elders to be weird, to stretch your being out into the furthest reaches of your most particular self, in order to show the young that it’s okay to explore the eccentricities of the soul. Well, you see a lot of that here. Even the flyers on the post office bulletin board reflect a rich, weird inner life.
I’m listening for ways to become weirder. (“7.1.2003”)
For both Corrigan and Thomson, this sense of correspondence between self and place is not something that comes “naturally” or is something that is inherited from being in the place they grew up. Rather, it is a construction that grows from deliberate engagement with place over time.
A Multi-local Sense of Place
For most Ecotone members, however, the relationship between their identities and places is more complicated, even conflicted. When considering the question of how they have been defined or shaped by place, many find it difficult to answer in any simple way. For Kent, it is a question that creates anxiety because she does not feel like any place defines her:
I’m sure, at least, I’m not defined by the places I’ve lived: not by Davis, nor by Santa Barbara, nor by Cambridge, Massachusetts, nor Cambridge, England, nor Paris, nor Birmingham (UK, university), nor Montpellier (junior year abroad), nor Derbyshire (boarding school), nor Madrid, nor least of all by Tiburon, Tiburon in Marin County, California, across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, where I spent the first five years of my life. (“How we”)
As someone with citizenship in both Britain and the US, she is a “permanent expatriate” who has always been defined by the place she does not currently live.
For Miguel Arboleda his mixed ethinicity and geographic mobility means that he does not lean on nationality to define his identity:
As a German/Filipino/only-discovered-at-twenty African American who grew up in Japan, the States, and Germany, who has been traveling since he was two, and was stateless until twelve years old, places as defined by humans, such as the arbitrary endowment of nationality or the invisible barriers of borders, never gave me any sense of belonging to a place. (“As a German”)
For Wendy Rogers, even though she was born in single culture, she has developed a sense of place that has been dispersed by mobility: “I’ve lived in several places—suburban mid-sized towns, a real ‘suburb’ of a large city, a small city. North. South. Homogenous. Multi-Cultural. So, I haven’t had one place erode me into form over many years.” She also feels that her relative youth is a reason that it is difficult to feel defined by place:
I haven’t lived here long enough, or lived long enough at all, I think, to have enough vantage. We can’t help but be formed, wherever we are, by the individuals we know, the culture that envelops us, and the moments through which we move. We are tied to place, since our activities and chances are tied to place. I’m still too close to see my big picture, but I know one is forming. So, I keep an eye out. (“On Coming”)
Coup de Vent is literally between two places, travelling regularly between London and her home in the country. She identifies more with her backpack as a place and with all the people she’s read or known in the past (“How I am”). Another Ecotone contributor, Joel Sax avoids describing a clear correspondence between himself and his place: “I’m neither this address nor is this address me. We’re converging facts and when we brush against each other, we make changes.” But he is also sensitive to the invisible affect of our actions on distant places:
My effects on the larger landscape are much more subtle: our cars contribute to the haze over Mount Santiago. This typing may disturb a skunk or a raccoon who is wandering through the complex. Our trash gets taken away to an unseen landfill. I’m not just shaping this place, in my own small way, but I am shaping sites beyond my vision, my hearing, my sense of smell, my taste, my touch. I am one of millions in this moon-shaped plain running from the Santa Monica Mountains to Camp Pendleton. I’m a human cormorant, discharging my guano, whiting the landscape. (Sax)
Nancy from Under the Firestar describes how she cannot fully identify with her adopted land her as an expatriate in a foreign environment, given her status in a globalized world where resources are scarce: “I’m like one of the fancy plants which are dying out of our garden. I am expensively watered, fed and temperature-controlled. I am always aware of this” (“How Are We”).
Ecotone blogger Kurt Brobek makes the distinction between being defined and being shaped. He is defined by the suburbs where he now lives but also is shaped by other places he has experienced in the past:
If I had to I could probably count the moments when I have been one with and changed—irrevocably—by place. My spiritual interests may have been decided when I took my first communion in a Catholic church in a Buddhist country, living for two years as a child in Bangkok. They were confirmed and enlarged taking long walks on the land surrounding Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, a Shaker village, and again roaming the knobby hills that comprise much of the land owned by the Abbey of Gethsemani. Again, my contemplative nature may have been developed by moments of wonder gazing at mountain vistas while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Virginia, or of ecstasy observing the tides that beat against the rocks of coastal Maine, considering the way those waves have worn rock to smoothness. Here in the suburbs, I have fallen in love with particular trees, and mourned their passing, or have seen myself changing slowly with the changing light of each surprising season. (“Thoughts”)
For Brobek, like other Ecotone writers, place identity is not defined in any simplistic way by his currently location, but rather includes experiences of past and distant places that he carries with him and that inform his sense of place now.
While Ecotone bloggers are motivated to write because their sense of place feels fragmented, it turns out they do not want to be defined by place if it means denying the fragments of their selves in exchange for a singular, stable, bounded sense of place. While they recognize need to define themselves in relationship to place, it turns out place is multivariate and complicated, more characterized by what Margaret Rodman terms “multilocality” than by a unitary sense of place (646). In fact, the concept of place itself appears to emerge from having experienced more than one place throughout their lives. In discussion following the first bi-weekly topic, Corrigan observes, “So much of this writing touches on how we became aware of ‘place’ as a concept by moving away from the places where we were born,” an insight with which several others in the group seem to agree. First comments,
Your second point is well taken, as well, Chris. As I think back over the past two weeks in a writing workshop (as a student) surveying the literature of Appalachia, I’m impressed by how many poets and writers live in other parts of the country and the world now, but write with passion about their home’s hills and hollers and homefolk back in Tennessee or Virginia. Certainly, moving away does offer the chance to ‘rise above your raisin’, in that it allows one to see familiar places from the vantage point of an outsider, seeing it again, for the first time. (“Discussion June 15”)
Similarly, Adams describes place as a concept born of mobility:
I didn’t think about that whole concept of “home” or being shaped by a landscape until I moved from it. People also push us into examining our identity and sense of place. Like Traveler Trish, I married into a Middle Eastern family. They immigrated here in the 1940’s and became a mirror for examining my own many-generational background and questioning all sorts of things I’d always taken for granted. They also had an entirely different sense of place and way of carrying it with them wherever they went that was fascinating to me. (“Discussion June 15”)
Place, then, is a relational category that only really becomes meaningful when it is used with reference to more than one location.
The place blog can be seen as a mechanism for putting these fragments of place identity in a meaningful frame, an interface for digital objects that represent these varied experiences of location. For First, blogging provides a format and an audience for weaving together fragments into a portrait of the self:
Weblogs have given some word-hunters like me the purpose, the accountability and the audience for their stories. And these “fragments” of daily life that I write—about the dog, the creeks, the garden and travel through midlife—each show, for better or worse, some small truth about this one-of-a-kind life. Taken together, the inconsequential details—a memory, an insight, a hope revealed—weave the fabric that is uniquely each of us. (“Good Neighbors”)
Scholar Kylie Jarrett describes the blog as “a database of the Self, an interface into the data set which is the blogger’s life, reflecting the self-determined algorithm which the author has used to bring order and to define the limits of that data set. The “database subjectivity” that emerges from the blog suggests that the self-in-place constructed through the blog is always a work in progress, just as places are not static or unitary entities (Jarrett). Every encounter with the blog interface brings ups the newly added fragments of place experience and the arrangement of objects is filtered and reordered to display different configurations of the self.
Place blogs, then, do not simply reflect an existing sense of place; rather, they participate in the “creative production of identity.” As Cresswell puts it,
Place is the raw material for the creative production of identity rather than an a priori label of social practice. Place in this sense becomes an event rather than a secure ontological thing rooted in notions of the authentic. Place as an event is marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence. (39)
By writing regularly and attentively about their experiences of place, place bloggers construct a unique discursive space in which to explore the increasingly complex relationship between life online and life in places. Place bloggers acknowledge the complexity of place:
One of the greatest difficulties in rethinking the nature of the place of new information technologies is not people who can’t imagine themselves being in two places at once, but rather those who fail to see that they are anywhere at all, who instead act as though the world is a set of locations in space, and they are standing outside of it. (“New Technologies” 12)
Place bloggers, by asserting this particular genre of blogging, attempt to construct a heuristic that helps reminds us that we are somewhere, however complex this experience might be.
If the individual acts as the portal to place in the framework of networked individualism, then what users in the network are interacting with then they encounter a place blog is not a singular place—Fargo, or Paris, or Floyd County—but a multivariate, shifting set of digital objects that may line up with a single place in only fleeting or partial ways. For Coup de Vent, blogging is a kind public art installation ground in a particular locale:
My partner, Paris, was in London this week. She saw a bloke get off a bus who was wearing a t-shirt from the Whitney Museum in New York. Across his chest it read “Site Specific Installation.” That’s me and my weblog—a site specific installation, an illuminated manuscript—a way of mapping time and place, emotion and fact. (“How I Started“)
Like a site-specific art installation, place blogs are designed to be displayed and encountered in specific places, and their meaning is defined by where they are. But they are best thought of as performance pieces in that they are never finished and they most constantly reinvented in order to accurately represent the ongoing construct of the self-in-place.