What is a Blog?

Since I asked the question, "what is a book?" in a previous post, I thought I'd ask the same about a blog. I sort of touched on this before when I wrote about how I have mixed feelings about blogs. Mostly, I feel like I am trying to blog, but I still don't really know how to do it.

I write in my journal faithfully. I don't always write what happened during the day. Mostly I write down things that I hear or see during the day that I think are interesting, and I'd say about 50% of my journals are me scheming on how I am going to figure out a way to travel. I started writing every day while I was on a study abroad in England. The study abroad was a literature and creative writing program, and it is basically how I got my English minor. We hiked from Edinburgh to Wales and down to London in two months. We had class in pastures and on mountains, we read Shakespeare and Dickens (who I don't really like) and Elliot (who I do really like). It was all very quaint, and it changed the way that I thought, and think, about writing and reading and life in general. At the beginning of the trip one of our professors said that we would "read the landscape and hike the literature". Ever since that trip, writing and travel are in some ways the same thing in my mind.

In class we always talk about the importance of audience. Going back to where I started with my journals, I am my journals audience (and perhaps a vague idea of my "posterity" - whatever that means). The...internet, and all of its participants, are a blog's audience. This blog is more specifically for my writing 150 class. I don't know what I have to say to you all!

But look at that, I posted 2 blogs today.

No title because I don't know what to blog about.

I could write about how I just received a research grant and I am STOKED about it.

I could write about how said grant has gotten me scheming again about how I am going to travel to Europe in the spring.

I could write about Occupy Wall Street and how I don't know how I feel about it, other than that I still feel like a flaming liberal in Utah.

I could write about the presidential candidate debates but I haven't really been watching them, which is shameful.

Mostly, I feel like I am in some kind of last-year-never-ending-paper-writing-vortex (of doom). In the past 7 days I have handed in 46 pages of writing. And I still have at least 50 to go by the end of the semester. I'm telling myself that next semester will be easier, but I don't know that that is really true. I'm managing. I'm not even sleep deprived and I have made it (almost) to the end of the week. I think if I can just make it to Thanksgiving, it'll all be alright. Today was actually very nice. I am grateful that it went so well. I got two major reports back and I got an A on one and an A- on the other, which is better than I was expecting. Its probably wrong but I mostly feel like, as long as I don't have to do it again, I dont care. Ds get degrees (or so I'm told). But I do care, really, as manifest by how happy A's made me today. Either way, I keep trying to enjoy college, since I have really loved the last four years, but I also comfort myself at times like this by thinking, someday, I'll get a degree, and it will be over! Hallelujah!

What is a Book?

I will be researching the ways that digital/audio books are changing the way that people "read". I am attempting to narrow the topic to either digital ebooks or audiobooks, but I just haven't decided yet.

On the topic of audio books, I have always been bothered that people equate listening to a book with reading a book. If you listened to it, you listened to it. If you read it, you read it. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but I think it is important to maintain a separation in our minds, and our language, between the two. listening and reading use different parts of our brains and are quite obviously different. Call me crazy, but that is how I feel. I obviously have a bias on this topic, but I'd like to find out more about how different the two are, and the pros and cons of each.

On the topic of digital reading, I am interested in kindles/ebooks/digital reading and the way they are changing the way people read. I have worked as the archivist at our university museum for going on four years. Basically, archives directs, organizes, and preserves all of the paper records that come in to the museum. The question of digital preservation is complicated. Thanks to technology we can now scan all of our paper records and make the digital copies available to patrons while keeping the physical records safe from wear and tear. However, some institutions have decided to keep the digital copies and throw out the physical records. In an effort to stop myself from going on for a page about what this means, I'll just say it is an issue of debate. It is a debate in libraries as well, as they consider how their function will change if kindles become the norm and books go to the wayside. As a side note, The Provo City Library offered a kindle as the grand prize for the summer reading contest this year. I am also a family history major, so paper records, and their physical preservation and digitization, are important to my career as well. I am also taking the bookbinding class this semester, where we are learning about the history of the book etc. So, basically, I have a lot of personal interest in this topic due to my job and my major. I am interested both in the debate about preservation and in how kindles change the actual, mental and physical process of reading. Do people read more? Does the brain process "digital" pages the same was as physical pages?

I think I am more interested in the second topic (kindles) than the audiobooks. Mostly, I will just go on random rants about how people shouldn't say they read a book when they listened to it, and vice versa (except no one ever says it the other way around, which I think is interesting. Ok, I'm stopping now). I also thought that this blog post was very interesting, and it is where I got the painful picture at the head of this post.