This idea has been rolling around in my head for the past few days, and it felt appropriate to examine it thoroughly on the medium of discussion. My question is this: is a blog just a commonplace book that’s digital and public?
Some background if you’re unfamiliar with commonplace books. They’ve been around for centuries as a means to gather thoughts, quotes, ideas, and just stuff in general that held any particular interest to the commonplacer. I particularly enjoy Megan Rhiannon’s post about it if you fancy a deeper dive. For the past year I’ve explored different commonplacing topics, mediums, and styles on my YouTube channel to try and figure out how to best fit commonplacing into my life. Which got me wondering, isn’t a blog a commonplace of sorts?
Now I do think there could be exceptions out there that would make these theory not true. Recipe blogs for example, but even then…isn’t a recipe blog just a collection of recipes with a person’s (usually longwinded) connection to and experiences with making the recipe? I might be so far down this thought trail that I could reasonably believe that all blogs are commonplace journals at this point… I can see where a blog recounting day-to-day happenings would be more of a diary or journal, but the moment other reference materials, products, books, quotes, etc. come into the conversation, it’s a commonplace blog.
A blog is a collection of thoughts, reviews, reactions, critiques, etc. all paired with a person’s personal thoughts on those topics. On this (rarely updated, often neglected) blog, I gather together my thoughts on topics that matter to me, just like I do in my commonplace. Why couldn’t this blog just be a public, shared, digital version of the things I put down in my commonplace? I share those pages on YouTube anyway, and this way they’d be easier for you to read then squinting at tiny font in a video. A blog is easier to search by topic, operating the same way as an index would in a tangible commonplace book.
Does the fact that a blog exists knowing someone is going to read it beyond the author, change anything? Since I know I’m writing to you, does that intrinsic bias alter the content I’m creating and thus alter it from being a commonplace? Are commonplace books only for the individual user or can they be shared works? The value of a commonplace book is having a reference you can go to over and over again. Just because this pool of reference material is available to others, that doesn’t make it any less of a valuable resource for myself. I often search my own blog for the frosting recipe for my family’s cutout cookies…
I don’t know what to do with this realization. Do I scrap the tangible commonplace book (even if I do make it digitally and just print it out) or do I continue on but incorporate this blog as another format? I am a firm believer in the value of having something tangible to hold and interact with beyond a screen. And I’m constantly questioning whether I mind duplicating my efforts, so of course I’m unsure about this, too. But one could argue there is value in trying something new…
Is this as simple as a, “Huh. That’s interesting.” and we carry on with our lives?
