When Fred First reflects on the Ecotone bi-weekly, “How you came to write about place and why,” his response is, “I live in a unique and beautiful world and enjoy creating images of it in words and pictures. I want others to know this place and share the experience of living here” (“Writing about Place”). It matters for First that his blogging is rooted in a particular location:
Fragments from Floyd comes every day from a literal address—the same desk in the same green valley of Southwest Virginia. Many blogs’ political or technological opinions and fact-streams have no bearing to their location of origin—which may even change from day to day now that road-posting and hand-held blogging is possible. Other weblogs, fewer in number, could be thought of as “where-blogs.” For these bloggers, place is central. (“Where-Blogs and Place”)
While most blogging operates largely without reference to place—even in spite of place—Fred wants to emphasize the centrality of location for kind of blogging he and the Ecotone bloggers feel they are doing. However, Fred does not reject the affordances of blogging that allow users to interact with others across distance. In an interview with Rebecca Blood, First recalls that it was both love of place and the desire to overcome geographic distance that motivated him to begin blogging:
But then—and this marks what I consider the real START of the blog—in early June I wrote a piece (Summer Lightning) about my ambivalence, feeling sad and disappointed with how I had been treated by “professional” peers but at the same time excited at the possibilities of a deeper grounding in the where of my life. I posted it to Fragments, and soon I got an email telling me how powerfully that person had felt my words, and how it had touched them and given them hope. I wanted and needed to reach other people then, to build community, because we live in a very physically isolated place and I was further isolated by my newly-unemployed status. I think that this was my core need—to listen to others and to be heard, and to make a difference, to be a part of something. (“Bloggers on Blogging”)
First figures place blogging as an act of hospitality to visiting readers who do not share his sense of place:
I write about place to invite strangers to know and understand my world, perhaps to see their world differently having come here. I’d like to think they may have new and useful landmarks on their maps when they leave here. So perhaps I write, too, as an open page of hospitality, a way of saying “my house is your house, and my creek and valley, likewise.” (“Writing”)
By positioning his readers as travelers and visitors, First suggests that he is writing about place but not primarily for place: he blogs about his life in Floyd County but not primarily for others who live in Floyd County.
While most Ecotone bloggers have some local readers in their audience, they tend to be writing for audiences who share an interest in place but may not share the place itself. Lorianne DiSabato writes entries that are deliberately and attentively grounded in the town of Keene, NH and the surrounding areas. But she’s not from Keene and she admits to being an outsider there. When asked in 2004 if she knows anyone in Keene who reads her blog, she responds, “Keene doesn’t know I exist” (Personal Interview). She knows someone a few towns over who reads her blog, and her landlord is at least aware that she’s keeping a one, but her audience by and large is made up of non-local readers. To say Keene doesn’t know she exists is not mean as a judgment on the reading habits of Keene residents or the depth of place-connection that DiSabato has created there. Rather, it suggests something important about the relationship between audience and geography in place blogging.
As Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford describe in their classic essay on audience, sometimes we write with particular people in mind and writing effectively requires us to know as much as we can about this audience (what they call “audience addressed”). At other times we have to imagine an audience of diverse readers about whom we may know very little, in which case we create roles we ask our readers to take on as they experience our text (“audience invoked”). In the context of place blogging, audience addressed can become more concrete: A blogger may literally know the audience’s address, and this knowledge of the audience’s geographic location informs the blogger’s rhetorical approach.
On the web, of course, blog posts can travel well beyond an addressed audience, and blogging about place for this imagined audience also affects the way we position readers in relation to the places being described. In this context, audience proximity is not just a way to create a sense of psychological intimacy between author and audience; it can also can have a geographic relevancy when you want to know if you can assume your audience shares knowledge a place. If your text references local places and people without explanation, readers who are familiar with that place will feel like insiders; those who are not will feel like outsiders. Conversely, taking time to explain local places can make an outside reader feel welcomed as a visitor while boring the local readers who may feel like they are no longer being addressed directly.
As the Ecotone group discusses their blogging practice, they begin to wonder if blogging about place for a distant audience might be working at cross-purposes to their goal of deliberately allocating attention to their own places. What exactly counts as place when investing one’s attention? Does it matter whether the place is yours or someone else’s, whether it is nearby or far way? Does reading and commenting on another blog represent a good investment of attention or is it simply a diversion. This chapter focuses on how blogging is constructed not out of individual investments of attention alone but rather through exchanges between bloggers and their audiences. As an aid for paying attention to place, place blogging always involves a tension between the near and the far, and the perspective it gives must constantly be negotiated. The challenge for Ecotone bloggers is to understand how digital objects, which circulate in the network without regard to physical distance, can help steer the flow of attention to place rather diffusing it in the endless reach of the network.
Blog as Place
In his seminal book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, Howard Rheingold describes the sense of place people felt with the WELL, one of the first and most well-known online communities. “The model of the WELL and other social clusters in cyberspace as ‘places’ is one that naturally emerges whenever people who use this medium discuss the nature of the medium.” He observes, “I’ve changed my mind about a lot of aspects of the WELL over the years, but the sense of place is still as strong as ever.” In the Ecotone bi-weekly topic for August 15, 2003, “Weblog as Place,” Ecotone members reflect on this the place-ness of blogs as Coup de Vent from London and the North asks the group, “Is your weblog a place in itself?” In her response to the prompt, Rana from Notes from an Eclectic Mind recounts regularly being corrected by a former professor every time she spoke of the internet as a “place.” Several Ecotone writers come to her support by testifying to what First calls the sense of “placeness“ they have experienced in their blogs (“So happy”). Fezoca from The Chatterbox explains how her blogs have literally become a room in her house:
After writing daily on this weblog for almost three years, I could say that it has become a place. Not only a metaphorical or virtual place, but a real physical space. I feel like this weblog is an extra room in my house—the one with the funky pink wallpaper—where I go every morning, or sometimes in the afternoon or night, and jot down my thoughts. (“Weblog as Place”)
Similarly, Rana’s blog has become part of the woodwork of her private life:
What began as a drawing board for the book I’ve been talking about writing for years quickly evolved into an alternate dimension, a private public space vital to my days. I now feel that I live my private life in a bedroom, two closets, a bath, and a blog. (“Weblog as Place”)
Rana’s seemingly contradictory notion of “public private space” suggests the way these imagined spaces become places not through individual expression alone but through the interaction with other bloggers. Allan Hollander suggests as much when he asks:
Is there something special about weblogs that make them possess more of a sense of place than other online fora? Place has always been an important metaphor for the web—witness the use of “home page” and “web site”—and perhaps the combination of the graphic design elements of the web and the prominence weblogs give to the individual writer’s voice enables a strong sense of place. And a weblog is happiest when other people stop by—it is always reaching towards community. (“A Place In Cyberspace”)
This “reaching toward community” is evident in the way Beth Adams describes her sense of proximity to other bloggers despite physical distance:
My blog feels so much like a “place” that I sometimes feel if I looked around the corner, the commentators would be gathered for dinner! I think the reason we are all a little perplexed by this is simply that this way of interacting—using our minds but not our physical presence—is so new. (“Ian, thanks”)
While Adams imagines her readers gathered for dinner, Alison Kent similarly views her blog as a site of hospitality, a place where fellow bloggers might join her for tea:
I write this with a cast on my left leg, on a laptop (which is conveniently on my lap), looking out the back window to oleander bushes which despite the increasing heat are still miraculously blooming. The space makes it seem as though these fifteen (or more) people are in the room with me. The weblog seems to be an extension of my living room. It is always in need of some tidying, but hey, everyone’s welcome anytime. The kettle’s on the stove. I’d get it for you if I could get up…. (“The Transformation”)
What is more, these interactions often spill out into other places, further blurring the boundaries between blog and life. As Rana describes it, “I began to litter my sentences in ‘real life’ conversations with references to what other bloggers were writing about on their sites. Like taking out a room in a crazy apartment building, I started to get to know the neighbors.” (“Weblog as Place”)
Rheingold describes his experience of the WELL as an online replacement for the “third places” that have steadily declined in recent decades:
There’s always another mind there. It’s like having the corner bar, complete with old buddies and delightful newcomers and new tools waiting to take home and fresh graffiti and letters, except instead of putting on my coat, shutting down the computer, and walking down to the corner, I just invoke my telecom program and there they are. It’s a place. (9)
What makes the WELL a “place” is the regularity of interaction: “The feeling of logging into the WELL for just a minute or two, dozens of times a day, is very similar to the feeling of peeking into the café‚ the pub, the common room, to see who’s there, and whether you want to stay around for a chat” (11). The sense of proximity here is created not by physical nearness but by synchronicity and habit: communication happens in something close to real time and it happens regularly over time. Virtual community is formed largely out of habits of rhetorical interaction with people in shared online spaces.
Calling Attention to the Physical
Experiencing the web as a rhetorical place is not unique to place bloggers; what is unique is the way this rhetorical place is designed to foster a deeper sense of connections to offline places. We begin to see this in the way place bloggers highlight the physical locations of their blogging:
This weblog is located in downtown Davis, California, USA. My visitors come from different places and are familiar with different languages and cultures. They stop by for a couple of minutes and get entertained by what they find here. They can talk to me while visiting or only pass through in silence—with a smile on their faces, though—for that I guarantee! (“Weblog as Place”)
Though Fezoca provides a geographic location for blog, she gives no indication that the visitors she mentions are dropping by in the flesh. In doing so, she articulates what appears to be a deliberately ambiguous relationship between where she tends to be blogging from (not the literal location of the server hosting her blog) and those she interacts with there.
While there is a resonance between the topic of place blogging—place—and the sensation of “placeness” that habituated online interactions can engender, Ecotone bloggers are not entirely willing to leave the body and the physical nature of places behind. In one post, Chris Corrigan exhorts the reader:
Look very closely at these words. If you lean into your monitor you will see that they flicker a little. Peer even closer and you see that each letter is made up of little squares. Take a magnifying glass to the screen and you notice that there is space between the pixels.\
This weblog is about a place, but it lives everywhere. At the moment it lives right in front of you, little more than light shining in your eyes. Reading it may invoke a feeling of being here on Bowen Island, but it is not Bowen Island itself. It lives only on your monitor. Once I publish the words, they reside as tiny 1s and 0s on a server in Vancouver. When you reach them via a URL they fly at the speed of light to where you live and they embed themselves in your context. (“August 15, 2003”)
While Corrigan acknowledges significance of our “mental landscapes” in how we experience places, he is hesitant to speak of weblogs as places:
But are weblogs places in themselves? I don’t believe so. Come to Bowen, swim with me in the phosphorescence on a late summer evening with crickets and nighthawks chirping away and you will know what it is like to be consumed by place. The next click you make will take you away from this weblog, but it’s not that easy in real life. When we are in place, we are rooted. We cannot leave without some part of us remaining behind, stretched out behind us, eventually catching up to where we now find ourselves. But with this weblog, perhaps with any weblog, we skim the surface, reside in the moment perhaps even try to peer into the depths. (“August 15, 2003”)
Similarly, Chris Clarke from Creek Running North prefers to make a clear distinction between the physical places he writes about and the representations of these places he creates:
Put it this way: There’s about a ten-inch section of one of my shelves that’s filled with nature writing from Nebraska and Kansas: Swallow Summer, The Last Prairie, PrairyErth. But my shelf is not a prairie. Last night I watched a rerun of the documentary Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner wryly grinning into the camera to narrate the Owens Valley War. But the television contains neither Reisner nor the Valley: both are dead, more or less.
I write in this weblog about place, when I’m not writing about me and my relationship with myself as I see it. But Pinole Creek does not at any point along its length flow through this Pinole Creek weblog: you are less likely to hear treefrogs in this blog than you are to taste salt by touching tongue to blue ink on a map of the bay. (“August 18, 2003”)
The sentiments of Clarke and Corrigan are far removed from the early utopian rhetoric of the web which promoted increasing virtualization as an inherent good and which viewed the web as new kind of place that would allow us to transcend our bodies and make geographic distance irrelevant.
In an earlier post entitled “Of Pilgrims and Place,” Kurt Brobeck wonders whether the “web is in some ways an inhospitable environment for writing about place” because it requires us to view everything through the screen of a computer:
Everything we write, every image we post, every Web site or Weblog we visit is supported by technology. I can’t look at Fred’s barn on Goose Creek without powering up my computer, logging on to the Net, and typing in a URL. Nor will the image be visible without the server on which it resides and a complex set of nodes facilitating communication between our two computers. When all this goes right, I may be rewarded with a very lovely two-dimensional image, but this image is not the thing itself. My interaction with life on Goose Creek is not as participant but rather as voyeur. (“Of Pilgrims”)
This mediated experience is inferior to actually visiting First in person, to the embodied experience of “feeling the cool air coming off the creeks and the jostling of one’s body while driving up a gravel road.” Likewise, the pleasure of viewing one of First’s photos is far inferior to “the pleasure of taking a walk through the wet pasture across the road from his house, or eating ice cream topped with Ann’s homemade hot fudge sauce on their upstairs porch.” In this sense, the effect of digital mediation on place is “unavoidably reductionistic” (“Of Pilgrims”).
He highlights what he sees as a difference in perceptual pace between computer-mediated experiences of place and more direct, embodied experiences: “The way I interact with the web is all about motion, whereas the way I interact with nature is all about stopping.” By contrast, his experience of his garden “requires qualities of slowing down, of paying attention, of observing not just that which is in the picture frame but everything which is outside it, as well.” In Brobek’s view, the web plays into a tendency in Western cultures toward a kind of Gnosticism which views the web as a new evolutionary development that will allow us to transform what it means to be human by transcending the limits of bodies and places. Brobek worries that significant aspects of our humanness “do not make it through the filter of technology,” aspects such as “breath and bone, flesh and blood, embodied spirit” that are necessary “for us to truly understand the nature of place” (“Of Pilgrims”). Brobek represents an ongoing critical attitude that informs the Ecotone community, an ethical impulse that seeks to guard against the Gnostic qualities of the web that might distract individuals from meaningful, embodied engagement with actual places
Environmental education scholar C.A. Bowers argues that the more time we spend in cyberspace, the less time we spend cultivating “high context” knowledge and gaining the intimate understanding of ecosystems that we need to preserve the health of our environments, a criticism that would suggest that the web is particularly ill-suited for helping people develop an ethical relationship with place (65). Citing anthropologist Edward Hall, Bowers, argues that “high-context” knowledge traditional has been created by embodied, face-to-face experiences of place, knowledge absorbed, often implicitly, through participation in place-based communities over time and passed from one generation to the next through coherent, relatively tight-knit networks of relationships (65). In Bowers view, “to digitize thought and aesthetic expression is to abstract them from their multilayered cultural and ecological contexts” and for this reason they are part of the problem, not part of the solution, when it comes to our relationship with place and the environment (54). From this perspective, blogging, by virtue of being a networked digital form of communication, participates in a broader cultural trend in which embodied, local knowledge is undermined by computer-mediated ways of knowing and experiencing the world.
Members of the Ecotone community share many of Bowers sentiments, particularly the deep commitment to environment protecting and sustainable living. They would agree with him that digitally mediated engagements with place are no replacement for the face-to-face, embodied experience of the environment, whether natural or built. Where Bowers takes a hard line in equating face-to-face with “high-context,” place bloggers are interested in exploring wider range of options in attempting to enrich a sense of context for their lives. Instead of the contrast between high-context and low context, we might more productively speak in terms of “low-bandwidth” and “high-bandwidth.” Face-to-face interactions will always have what technology pioneer Mitchell Kapor has termed high “emotional bandwidth,” while blogging and even more sophisticated 3D forms such as Second Life and other networked games will always be in some way lower-bandwidth that our physical experience of the world. However, the tradition of environmental non-fiction or nature writing demonstrates that low-bandwith forms of mediation can play an important role in cultivating meaningful relationships to place; in this tradition, reading and writing about the environment has never been viewed as a substitute for getting out and spending time in the nature world, but rather as a way to enhance and augment ones practice experience of place.
This, of course, does not remove the need to reflect critically on the effect that digital technologies might be having our relationship with place, but place bloggers avoid dismissing digital media out of hand simply because they offer mediated experiences. In this sense, Ecotone writers eschew what Ulises Mejias calls a “vulgar” understanding of virtuality,” one which “exhibits a bias for temporal/spatial nearness and against mediation: it claims that direct, unmediated interaction is always best” (Networked 101). Place bloggers come to accept the notion that experience of place is always mediated, if not by reading or blogging, then by the glasses on our face and the ideas in our heads. All we can do is attempt to examine as best we can how our mediations work, to assess what they both reveal and conceal in framing our experiences of the world.
Lenses for Seeing
In a discussion of their posts on how they are defined by place, First observes that several responses to the first bi-weekly topics that “quite consistently the reader learns more about the internal landscape of the writer than the external.” Corrigan replies that “landscape only really exists inside” because the it is “the connection we make between the elements of the physical world and the meaning we give them that creates the landscape.” He continues by asking, “Why is a mountain view beautiful? It has nothing to do with the mountain, only with the meaning we pile on that mountain. In fact the word “view” should give it away. Our view of things first causes us to perceive the world around us and then we shape it, and in so doing, shape ourselves” (“Discuss Shaped”).
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Alison Kent (“Camera”)
In the context of place blogging, views of place are constructed on a daily basis, as post after post accumulate over time. Within this heuristic framework, the obligation to post regularly provides incentive to look again at place, to come back around the familiar to see what might become visible at another glance. The act of putting one’s place into words on a regular basis becomes a lens for focusing attention. For Alison Kent, writing is not just a way to represent what we see: rather, it is itself a way of seeing. As Annie Dillard describes it, “Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it” (30). When describing how she began to start writing about place, she is tempted to begin thanking all the places she’s known that have inspired her, but she has to give attribution first to writing itself: “But for me the writing came first, and Venice taught me the connection between them. By writing I learned to think about place, which in turn made me SEE it. And the cycle continues … looking makes me listen, makes me alive to the infinite transformations around me that make a place THIS place (“Water”). For Kent, it is possible to have deep relationships with place without writing, but writing provides an interpretive mechanism to make sense of them in different ways, to create a narrative of identity that connects the various places that make up who she is.
While writing is the most common mode of expression for Ecotone bloggers, they also take advantage of the multimodal affordances of blogging. Adam’s metaphor of “turning on that mental recorder” becomes more literal as they turn on recording devices such as digital cameras, as in First’s description from Fragments from Floyd:
In my life, the real lenses of the camera (and the microscope, during my biologist life) have made me more acutely aware of the beauty and form of “ordinary” things, given me a different appreciation of things than I might have had without looking closely and with interest and awe through these wonderful devices that focus the mind on detail. Photography is an important part of my exploration of place, and in some ways, the images that I share from time to time are as important as the words, bringing my place immediately into yours, bridging both distance and the otherness that separates strangers. Through my lens, you can see through my eyes, share my sight, insight, and vision. (“Writing About Place”)
For First, the lens camera and microscope operate as literally and metaphorically to describe the mediating role his blogging practice place in helping him pay attention to place:
Lenses are real, and they are metaphors for anything that lets us or makes us see the world differently. Each of us has a “philosophical lens” that molds our thinking and our writing. It clarifies, magnifies, distorts, and colors our perceptions and understanding of the reality around us. When I write about my particular place here on Goose Creek, I portray it through a refracting lens that bends and molds my view of life in a way that is unique, even from my neighbor’s. Yours lens, too, is as distinct as your thumbprint, and when focused on that ground under your feet, your words about what you see, and your pictures offer us worlds about you in your place we would never have known. (“Writing About Place”)
There are no claims to objectivity here since all perception of place is mediated, either by material forms—something as simple as my eyeglasses—or the ideological and cultural lenses that refract our perceptions of the world in less concrete forms.
Indeed, digital photography becomes an extension of place blogging practice, extending the composition process out into physical places and connecting it back to what takes place later in front of a computer. For Lorianne DiSabato from Hoarded Ordinaries, photography provides a heuristic for seeing that can foster a Zen-like attentiveness to ordinary places:
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Lorianne DiSabato (“Getting\ (Re)Acquainted”)
I’m always surprised when people compliment me on the photos I post on my blog, for these are snapshots of the most ordinary kind. Walking around Keene with a leash in one hand and a digicam in the other, I simply record what I see: there is very little “art” or intention behind it. And yet, this kind of simple seeing is indeed the very heart of meditation practice: without judgment or preconception, what is it that falls before your eyes at any given moment? Without judgment or preconception, can you love that sight as if it were your very last? (“Getting (re)acquainted”)
While digital photography is perhaps the most common way to incorporate visual media, Kent and Alan Hollander also include sketches with their posts, a practice that has carried over from keeping a place-based logbook. The place bloggers, then, are broadly interested in exploring the affordances of blogs and other technologies to figure out in what ways these tools can act as heuristics for paying attention.
Hollander identifies his relationship with place as tied to the technologies he uses to engage with places. As a geographer by profession, he often interacts with geographic data using the latest geospatial technologies, and yet he recognizes the limits of these technologies in helping him develop a deep sense of place. He recalls writing the following poem to keep from dozing off at conference on internet map services:
Glowing screens
—managers stare
World a geodatabase.
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Putah Creek saunter
—A hawk enters my haiku.
Who is the wiser? (“Of Space”)
The first two stanzas depict the dark side of modern spatial technologies, which he explicates more fully:
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Allan Hollander (“Gelly Roll and Wash”)
The danger in our modern world of geodatabases, remote sensing technologies, and GPS mapping tools with sub-meter accuracies, is that what cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in computer maps gets forgotten about. These spatial tools are eminently technologies for the managerial mindset, designed to support the archetypal “decision-maker.” Lost here is any notion of place as narrative, or place as history. (“Of Space”)
The remainder left out by these spatial technologies is what motivates him to blog about place, what he describes as “the almost mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality.” The humanistic approaches of John Stilgoe and John Brinckerhoff Jackson help offset the distant, detached interaction with place characterized by his professional work as a geographer. His poem contrasts the distant, detached interaction of seeing the world through the lens of geographic data with the embodied experience of walking along the creek near his home where his encounter with a hawk symbolizes the possibility of relationship in and with places. In the context of this post, the contrast is also between two ways of engaging with places—GIS systems and blogging—and in his formulation blogging offers a more humane interface for helping him address the “mystical striving for awareness of a particular locality:”
I was always one for a saunter anyway. As John Stilgoe puts it, cycling along at 11 miles an hour is an ideal way to explore the landscape (at such a speed one can gaze straight through picket fences), and wandering on bicycle or foot is deep in my bones. If every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to light. (“Of Space”)
Hollander draws a connection here between sauntering and blogging, between embodied engagement with place and the act of telling stories, both of which are contrasted with the rather bloodless, data-driven approached to mapping.
As the “information superhighway,” the internet is designed to move large amounts of information quickly and to expedite the flow of attention to as many places as possible. To counter this, Ecotone bloggers attempt to create a momentary “information walkway,” a rhetorical practice that encourages us to shift perceptual gears in order to encounter our world at a local scale. A blog post about place, whether made up of writing, photographs, or sketches, represents a moment of slowing down and deliberately allocating attention to the particularities of local.
Assessing the Costs of Audience
The metaphor of place blog as lens suggests a tool that the individual uses to manage his or her individual attention, possibly obscuring the collaborative nature of seeing that Ecotone members value in their place blogging practice. Alison Kent emphasizes the collective nature of perspective on place:
I’d like to think this perspective can be altered over time and by the perspectives of others. If not, nobody would ever go to a photography or landscape painting exhibit—we seem to have a need to see through the lenses of others. Which is why I believe this wiki is really on to something.
Who was it—Nancy from the Fire Star—who spoke of seeing the knife grinder through the “filter” of this assignment? That’s kind of how I feel, at the moment—everyone here, collectively, is giving me a new lens or series of lenses through which to view not only the environment here, with which I’m quite familiar, but the environments of others, some of which I’ve never seen. —Alison (“Discuss Shaped”)
The image Kent presents is of passing a lens around from viewer to viewer to look both one’s own place and the places of others.
Lisa Thompson admits being intrigued by the possibilities of social connections that would network her sense of place, connecting her writing with the writing of others around the world: “I sit here in Inverness writing about my place on the earth, while other Bloggers of Place and other lovers of some place sit in respective spots around the world. We can collectively build quite a portrait of every place (“5.9.2003”). Similarly, Kurt Brobek expresses his pleasure in being able to “visit” First despite having voiced some reservations about what seemed like the Gnostic tendencies of the web: “Speaking for myself, this shortcoming of the web is not a black or white problem. Thanks to the web, I’ve had the pleasure of spending an afternoon with Fred and Ann on Goose Creek, before getting back on the road to Burma Shave” (“Of Pilgrims”). Having just distinguished clearly between visiting First’s blog and visiting him in person, he attests to the pleasure of interacting with Goose Creek in a way that playfully conflates the real and the virtual.
In First’s view, the benefits of putting his sense of place into the network is that his attempts to connect become linked to other like-minded bloggers around the country:
When we write about place we explore particular coordinates of geography and landform and private experience, guided by our own life maps, seen through lenses that can bind me to your world across the globe’s wide curve. And doing so connects us person to person, territory to territory. It puts real places on the representational map that is the Internet. Can this writing about place bring us into each other’s world and build “real” community? I trust we will see. (“Writing”)
First uses the map as a metaphor for individual place identity as explored through writing, but blogging in particular allows writers to view themselves through a networked lens which creates and reveals connections between people and their places, merging individual maps of place the larger “representation map” of the internet.
Corrigan describes the function of his blog: “to capture my experiences for myself, for my family who are scattered across North America and for friends in Israel, South Africa, America and the UK” and “to introduce my readers to these places in a more concrete and connected way (“June 15”). Blogging allows him to maintain geographically dispersed social networks, and like First he positions his readers as tourists or visitors and himself as their guide:
I have even begun posting stories of my life here on an interactive GeoLibrary which in essence returns the stories to the place that birthed them, and coincidently introduces my readers to these places in a more concrete and connected way. A project that started in exile, now continues with an exile’s eyes, writing a landscape that surrounds and holds me, and constantly inspires. (“June 15”)
For Corrigan, then, place blogging is a way of maintaining relationships with people who he no longer lives near, reflecting the importance of local knowledge for maintaining relationships: it is difficult to know people well if we know nothing about where they are. But having this audience also serves to provide an opportunity to construct place identity through discourse. The way Corrigan describe it, place blogging is a form of social media which serves not just to construct and reveal our network of social relationships, but also our networks of place relationships, the connections between ourselves and the places to which we belong.
These projections of place sense circulate in the network such that people form connections between each other based on their experiences of place. As Corrigan puts it,
People who blog places are making sense of the land in which they live and are situating themselves both in that space and in the greater and wider space that is constituted by the minds of their readers. If my weblog is read in South Africa, then my inner landscape of Bowen Island is projected there, and the reader there makes the connections between my writing and his or her life. It is not a hyperlink but it does bind us together and it extends something of this place all the way out to you, wherever you are. (May 16, 2003)
In reflecting on what she does in her blogging, Beth Adams expresses the desire to examine place “both from an intimate and a broad perspective”:
It seems to me that everything I write is somewhat about “place,” if we extend that definition concentrically to be one person’s place in her locality, her region, her country, her culture, the world’s culture, the life of the spirit. On another axis you might also say I’m writing about one person’s place in time, extending forward (into questions of technology, science, human impact on practically everything) and backwards (toward a greater understanding of myself in history). (“Some Thoughts”)
Place blogging, then, scales from the most personal and local of topics to the broadest possible issues of ecology and sustainability, as well as from the concrete to the abstract. Adams wonders if “there is a place in the blogosphere for this sort of searching and conversation,” one that might remain “grounded in writing about our most fundamental “place” relationship—with nature” (“Some Thoughts”). As, Chris Corrigan frames it, this is not an either/or proposition:
The act of blogging place, it seems to me, is an act of both placing one in intimate proximity with one’s surroundings and placing the whole kit and kaboodle in the context of a world culture. Anyone in the world anywhere in the world can theoretically read Bowen Island Journal. Edward Hall or Marshall McLuhan might argue that this means that Bowen Island (at least as I see it) is extended to the world. It encompasses the world. (“Place Blogging Description”)
Ecotone bloggers want to take advantages of the affordances of the network to create new possibilities for sociality and interaction, but they want to also foster closer attention to the physical locations in which they live. The group seems to agree that even our physical, embodied experience of place is always shaped by our the ideological lenses with which me must necessarily see the world, so the goal is not to rid ourselves of lenses, but attend more thoughtfully to the particular kinds of mediation we choose. What we see here is a consensus that paying attention to digital objects must in some way count as paying attention to place. If this is the case, then a wider audience creates more opportunities to interact around the digital objects that stand in for place.
The importance of reading other peoples blogs is not as an escape from the limits of one’s geographic situatedness, but as means of engaging more fully with one’s own place. One might increase one’s knowledge of geography—as a tourist might—but what one gains from reading other place blogs in not just knowledge of another place, but insight into other ways to engage a place—heuristics and ways of thinking that one can bring back to blogging about one’s own place. For First the ultimate goal is not simply to expand the range of one’s personal map to include more places in a general sense, but rather to gain insights into one’s own relationship to place:
Maybe I think and write about place because, as I believe Wendell Berry has suggested, if you don’t know where you’re from, you won’t know where you’re going. In some small or great way, it may be possible in writing on this topic to help each other know where we’re going by better understanding the places from which we have come. (“Writing”)
In other words, the goal of place blogging is not to become more familiar with Floyd County or Davis, California, or Bowen Island in itself; rather, place blogging, in First’s formulation, only serves its purpose if readers return to their own place having gain insights that deepen their own sense of place where they are. Because a place blog is not itself a substitute for the place it represents, its job is not to keep people there. Place blogs are only rhetorically successful if they convince readers to leave them.
However, this raises a question: if place blogging enables individuals to enhance their attention to place, at what level of zoom? For the allocation of attention in a place blogging network to be a two-way street, participants must be willing to zoom out from one’s local place and attend to your relationship to another member’s local place. The interactions with geographically distant readers create a tension when one of the stated goals of attention exchange is to counter the bias of the network toward the global rather than the local.
The tension that place bloggers must deal with is that the internet as a medium makes it very easy to move between a local perspective on our lives to a global perspective—and everything in between. As Steven Johnson argues this perspective is part of shared cultural perspective that shapes the way we perceive the world. As Johnson has observed, most periods in history have characteristic “ways of seeing,” such as “the fixed perspective of Renaissance art, the scattered collages of Cubism, the rapid-fire cuts introduced by MTV and the channel-surfing of the 80’s.” Johnson argues that the view most characteristic of this era is what he terms “the long zoom,” exemplified by:
satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in “Fight Club” that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity.
For Johnson, these do not just represent a way of perceiving the world, but a conceptual approach that enables us to move “from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics—and back again” (“The Long Zoom”).
While the networked affordances of blogging make it easy to zoom both in and out, bias of the web is to often to zoom out, undermining an efforts to pay attention to place at the scale of the most local and ordinary. Ecotone blogger Maria Benet describes the way reading other place blogs has allowed her experience places in deeper ways:
As I started to read more blogs, I found myself drawn into the worlds of other people. Day in and day out I followed them, as some followed me, I suppose. It wasn’t long before the worlds they described in their blogs became almost as familiar to me as my own. Is it any wonder then that when it came to going to Pittsburgh or London, I didn’t feel as if I were leaving the familiar outlines of my home? Quite the opposite; I could hardly wait to see the landscape—the shapes and colors of the place—that was not so much backdrop, as an other character in their daily narratives. (“Impalpable”)
In this sense, place blogging has succeeded in making places come alive as more than just setting but also as characters in the lives of those writing about them.
But the problem she faces is that these places are not her places, and in this sense she while she may be gaining insight into Place in a phenomenological sense, she’s not necessarily deepening her connection to her own place. Benet describes the way place blogging can sometimes create a conflict between the time one spends in front of the computer writing and the time one spends in embodied engagement with places:
Once I migrated my blog to Movable Type and people started to stop by, and I, in turn, started to travel farther in the worlds of blogs, my walks in my physical neighborhood became less frequent and I spent a lot less time in my garden, or even caring about it. My focus shifted to worlds that came to me first in words only. At first, it was intoxicating to find out about the state of certain flowers in some other blogger’s garden in Vermont, for example—even as my own rose bushes, just out of view of my office, began to fail. To know where in London one can have good Lebanese food, to take another example, made me feel, somehow, a bit more worldly—or rather, a bit more as if my neighborhood just got bigger, even as I was eating leftovers from my fridge because I didn’t have the time to go exploring restaurants or grocery stores within a wider circle of my physical neighborhood. (“Impalpable”)
If the practice of place blogging is grounded in the embodied experience of one’s own place, then a tension will always exist between the attention one gives to digital objects and the attention one gives to place.
In Kurt Brobek’s view, one of the hazards of online discourse for place bloggers is that the impulse to zoom out creates desires that can distract us from the work of attending to the local. As Brobek describes it, his “interaction with the web, and with webloggers, is conditioned by longing”—“longing for knowledge, longing for consumer goods, longing for self-expression, longing for community, as well as plain old eroticized longing.” In Brobek’s experience, “A typical session online may bounce me around and against desire for all of these. That desire may be exhausted, but never sated.” He contrasts this cultivation of desire with “a love a place…built not on desire for something I cannot have, but on appreciation, perhaps accrued very slowly, for that which I do have, for that which has already been given to me and which graces my life” (“Of Pilgrims”). For Brobeck, then, managing attention toward place through exchanges with a distant audience comes with risks:
The risk is that I will behave like the newly converted, unable to see that while the web can put me in touch with smart and interesting people like Cassandra [Beth Adams], it can just as easily separate me from the guy who lives next door whose tree shades my lawn in the afternoons. (“Of Pilgrims”)
This word of caution serves to articulate what will be an ongoing concern for Ecotone bloggers: the need to take advantage of the networking benefits of the web while still staying grounded in the concrete realities of place, that which lie outside the network.
As we will see in the next chapter, however, this does not represent the only way to frame these issues. Other strains of place blogging that emerged independently of the Ecotone group have avoided these tensions by shifting the scope of their audience and simply blogging for “the guy next door” instead, offering another strategy for organizing attention around place.