immersion in narrative

No time today to write the long, thoughtful post that's rumbling around in my head right now. But I can at least sketch out some of the ideas, so that when I do have time (perhaps while traveling to Albuquerque this weekend) I can expand (expound?) upon them. Or maybe not. Either way, some of this has to get written before the end of the day, or my head's going to explode.

I've been meeting people IRL ("in real life") after first meeting them online for a lot of years now--starting with the University of Michigan CONFER conferencing system back in 1986. Since then I've had in-person meetings with people I've encountered on CompuServe's CB Simulator, Usenet newsgroups. DC-area BBS systems, FidoNet echos, e-mail lists, and most recently, blogs.

But this weekend, meeting Joey deVilla, I had a very different reaction to the in-person encounter than I've had in the past. And I've had to think about why that is.

Weez has written about her sense of blogs as "first-person narrative in real-time." (Here, here, here, and here.) Of all the blogs I read on a regular basis (and yes, my blogroll is also my reading list; I'm not an aggregator kind of a girl), Joey's is probably the most story-like in its presentation. From the title of the blog ("The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century") to the self-as-narrator voice he regularly employs:

This was end-of-a-John-Hughes-movie moment, the sort of thing airline pilots would call a "textbook landing". It was time to close the deal. I put an arm around her waist and drew her closer. Our faces were closing, maybe only an inch apart now...

...when I felt a hand on my shoulder, pulling me back. What the hell?

I turned around to see who was trying to ruin the best date ever. (more...

Joey brings you into his story, with detail and--as KF put it--emotional authenticity. You know that it's real, you understand that this is autobiographical, but it's still a damn good story, not "just" a journal entry.

So meeting Joey on Friday night, sitting in the Tequila Bookworm, was a mind-altering experience for me. A through-the-looking-glass kind of thing. All of a sudden, I was in the story, sitting with my favorite character in his favorite watering hole. There are plenty of children's stories based on just this kind of fantasy--even TV shows based heavily on the premise (from Gumby and Poky to Steve and Blue's "blue skidoos" in Blue's Clues). But I have to say it's the first time I've ever had such an experience unmediated by a book or screen.

Happily, by Saturday night I'd gotten over that initial sense of disconnect, and was able to genuinely enjoy spending an evening with Joey and his friends.

Looking back at it, I'm still struck by the worlds-collide feeling that I had. It speaks to something being very different about blogs versus other computer-mediated communication. Email, newsgroups, bbs systems--they don't make it possible to create the kind of personal narrative and sense of place (note to self: go back and re-read Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place) that blogs seem to facilitate.

There are visual presentation issues with this, as well. I think reading Joey's posts in an aggregator would have changed my sense of him and his environment. That's an area I've not seen much work in--the extent to which the visual presentation of the blog affects the perception and representation of the writer.

But I'm out of time to explore this, so I'm going to hit post and go back to my crazy daily schedule.