Journal 5 - Van Williamson

I think when I’m writing something, I always have the audience in mind before I start so that I can put myself in the right mindset. Usually when I do an assignment that involves writing (and maybe not a lot of formality), I try to inject something witty or thought-provoking for my own entertainment. I don’t really consider the possibility of what I write being spread via digital media, but there is a part of me that hopes someone will be amused by what I have to say. I also have several personal notebooks, where I jot down thoughts, jokes, and little images in my head. The other day a friend of mine looked through one of them and said that I should be careful with them. I was a little perplexed, until he pointed at my doodles, which resemble the illustrations in the children’s book from The Babadook. He told me they could easily become my manifesto if I ever went insane. I was shocked when he told me this. Besides the fact that he was implying something pretty messed up, I had never considered the idea that my writing could be spread that way. 

There’s a lot of content on the internet that has nothing to do with its creator, because it gets thrown into one of the many aggregators online. But there are also texts that are inextricably linked to their author, because it has something that makes it uniquely theirs. The most common reason for this would be because they became famous, drawing in an audience with their actions and personality. A good example of this is Kurt Cobain, whose fan base leaves no stone unturned when trying to learn about the Nirvana singer. The HBO documentary about him, Montage of Heck, digs so deep into his life that it almost begins to teeter on the edge of voyeurism. I’m sure he expected some of his everyday composing to gain importance once he became the voice of a generation, but there are plenty of tapes and home videos of him that don’t reveal much of anything about him. His spreadability might have become too great for his ghost to live up to, and yet for some reason I feel like I would want the exact same thing.