There’s an interesting and unusually poignant discussion over at Elouise’s about writing intensely personal blog posts. A suggestion I like is that once published (abstracted) feelings are no longer personal. Everyone feels them. That would be the difference between publishing what Jonathan calls truth and publishing facts.
I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
jon
Jean Baudrillard has something similar to this in his discussion of the Lourds – a TV show which ran in the early 70s. I think it’s in Simulations. He talks about the erasure of the viewing frame so experience /feelings becomes shared.
Norman
The mind, potentially, is an amazingly malleable entity. The primary limits to what we permit it do come back to the extent to which we want to let it wander off in particular directions, or are willing to let it adopt any one of a wide range of particular “positions”.
Given, as we are, what no other species has, an intellectual awareness of ourselves, combined with the impossibility of ever understanding existence itself, it’s not surprising to find people interested in experimenting with “finding their personal meanings”, or trying to cross and recross the borders between what they see as “truth” and “reality”.