Why write a postcard to yourself, dummy?
As my other blogging attempts demonstrate, I am lousy about keeping up with them. A postcard, however, can be a very easy task to accomplish. I know I can distill my daily experience into several lines of text. My ambition is not to create a travel blog or even a journal or diary of my trip, I just want a few images and words that evoke an experience. I want to keep it simple and manageable. I just need a virtual souvenir that goes beyond an image or 140 characters that I can maintain daily (or as often as possible).
Ever since I began (and completed) my master’s thesis about the relationship between literature and the Internet I have been fascinated by the dematerialization of objects. In the case of literature, we see the dematerialization of the book into a digital (immaterial) entity. With this postcard project, I want to explore the immateriality of memory. A postcard is an ideal snapshot of a memory or experience. It’s the marriage between image and text in a concise and reduced form. A letter is can be very personal, but a postcard is out in the open, a semi-public manifestation of verbal vacation souvenir– very fitting for the Internet. Anyway, it’s 2016, we all know people don’t want to read text without an image and we also know that no one wants to read a big long block of text on a screen. Thus, a virtual postcard seems to be the best and most pertinent format for a travelogue: the format of a postcard combines an emotional memory with a visual memory. Besides, I want some trace of my 105 day experience in India that exists outside of my use of social media.
A blog, like a postcard is a place where I can compile evidence of my daily experience. However, I wonder about the sincerity of turning my human experience into Internet Content™. Content should mean something but in the context of the Internet it sounds empty. Content sounds like a way to fill the vast wasteland of a webpage. Content as a virtual tumbleweed. Meaningless content. Filler. This is of course implying that my experience is full of meaning and that my content will be pertinent.