Journals, Journals Everywhere
Wow, it's amazing how many more hits my journal gets when someone like Al or Ceej includes a link to it in one of their entries! (I think each of them get a hundred hits a day or more. I'm still in the ten-to-twenty range. Which is fine, actually.)
Although I'm always happy to dive head-first into a brouhaha, this one isn't one I have a lot of personal stock in. I'm only tangentially part of the "journalling community", and indeed I regard the term as something of an oxymoron: Journals are personal and solitary things as far as the writing of them goes (much like writing fiction is personal and solitary, generally), and a community of journalers doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's not like a group of people with a common interest; journalling is more of a "meta-interest", I'd say.
What really exists, I think, are groups of people who are friends, and these groups encounter each other because all of their members keep (or at least read) on-line journals. But I don't consider this a "community" per se, and I don't see how casting a critical eye towards anyone's journal is going to improve the community in any concrete way. Heck, given the amount of crap on the Internet generally and the Web specifically, I don't even see how a lot of crummy journals really hurts anyone. I mean, Sturgeon's Law still applies.
I find that my interaction with the journalling community occurs more because of my fascination with the community than because I happen to keep a journal. There are some interesting people there, and the group on DIARY-L is a very peculiar assortment of people. But I keep plugging away at my journal mostly independently of the interactions I have with other journalists. I mention a few journalists here from time-to-time because they caught my interest in some way, but of course most of my entries don't mention other journals at all.
I think this is sort of like my fascination with science fiction fandom: So much of it has nothing at all to do with science fiction and fantasy, which I find peculiar and baffling in the extreme. The journalling community is just basically peculiar and baffling in its very existence. Much of the discussion seems to have less to do with actually writing journals than with the state or members of the community. A sort of meta-meta discussion.
Most odd.
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