From the beginning of the Web, the theme of writing has been predominant: the Web was born as a digital blank page to be filled with content, and many pioneering network writers immediately envisioned the digital page as a diary. Initially, it was fifteen-year-old Justin Hall, then thousands, and later millions of writers began to create their own online diaries, interacting with each other, increasingly populating the web, inhabiting it with their daily reflections. Web diarists have inhabited and continue to inhabit all the different platforms that the internet has generated: web logs, forums, MySpace, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter-X, and many others. Among the diarists are also those who make a profession out of writing and use the Web log to exercise their narrative skills. If the first can be called diarists; for the second, writers aware of the linguistic canon, the term diarist might be inappropriate. In this case, for convenience and disturbing Leopardi, we will call the writer's Web log a Zibaldone:
«A notebook of notes and sketches recorded without order: the evolution of Leopardi's thought can be reconstructed from the notes of his 'Zibaldone'.» (DEVOTO OLI)
Among the Web zibaldones, to cite Italian examples, we recall that of the writer Giuseppe Genna (with his historic eponymous blog, the new one opened these days letterutura e pensiero and his Facebook page), Tiziano Scarpa (on the collective blog il primo amore), the architect-writer Gianni Biondillo (on the collective blog nazione Indiana), Wu Ming (an imaginary writer born and created by a collective of authors, active on several blogs including giap) or Michela Murgia (the first blog Il Mio Sinis no longer visible). Their online writings, in part, have been edited by various publishers.1
«I am a blogger,” writes science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, “and a fan of snippets of narrative associated randomly, but it has always been clear to me that the content of a blog has a short life. It's like performing stand-up comedy.»2
«On Valentine's Day 2004 in Naples, during Galassia Gutenberg, a round table on the relationship between weblogs and writing was held. Despite the quality of the speakers, it was not a happy evening: I still remember Derrick de Kerckhove, seated among the audience, shaking his head disconsolately in front of the moderator's arguments. The Ansa news agency reported the news as 'a meeting of anonymous diarists of uncertain sexuality', while de Kerckhove hurried to declare to Il Mattino that the blog "is the first creature of the Network that demonstrates the true maturity of the medium. I do not believe it is an exhibition of the self, but rather of the relationship with others."»
Fortunately today, no reporter would write about a meeting of anonymous diarists of uncertain sexuality, but it is important to dwell on de Kerckhove's irritated response: blogs are not an exhibition of the self, but on the contrary, of the relationship with others. The writings on the Web, therefore, with the absence of the fourth wall and the possibility to interact directly with the writer, generate more social than intimate dynamics.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the art historian Alois Riegl5, argued that between stylistic restoration - theorized by Viollet-le-Duc - and integrative restoration (non-restoration) - theorized by John Ruskin - a dialectical reading between what is considered high and what is low is necessary, thus avoiding value hierarchies. One cannot read history, Riegl maintained, by retracing only what belongs to high culture. The historian must take into account the whole, since the hierarchical view is partial. Riegl's lesson, transposed onto the observation of Web dynamics, remains current and helps us not to read history by attributing hierarchies of values, but to activate a dialectical reading between what is considered high and what is low. Thus, analyzing the writings on the net means observing them in their variety: low - simple Web diary - and high - Web zibaldone.
To understand the potential value of simple web diarists, we use the conservation work of the Archivio di Pieve Santo Stefano6, which since 1984 has been collecting writings of ordinary people: diaries, epistolaries, autobiographical memoirs. Here every year a competition is announced, the Pieve Prize, and an unpublished diary is published. From here come out of the drawers small unwitting masterpieces, such as Clelia Marchi's sheet, Vincenzo Rabito's notebooks, or the diary of the architect Sergio Lenci. I report the synopses of the diaries from the site archiviodiari.org:
«The sheet of Clelia Marchi: One night, Clelia can't find a piece of paper in the whole house. Suddenly her memory returns the face of the elementary school teacher. Martini Angiolina used to tell that the Etruscans wrapped mummies in sheets. She opens the wardrobe and takes a white sheet from the trousseau, from a dowry that is no longer needed. She lays it on a pillow and places the pillow on her lap. She glues her husband's photo on the left, hers on the right, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus in the center. Impulsively, she begins to write the story of her life, only truths and no lies.»
«Vincenzo Rabito: The picaresque saga of a semi-literate Sicilian, born in 1899, told in a thousand dense pages, with a semicolon separating each word from the next. Thus, the war on the Piave is stripped of all rhetoric - cynical and disillusioned, Vincenzo thinks only of sleeping and eating -, then he lives the poverty of the South, Libya and Abyssinia in a black shirt, celebrates the landing of the Americans, practices the black market, fosters banditry, always managing between mafiosi and carabinieri, smuggling and legality.»
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«Sergio Lenci: Targeted by the terrorists of the Front Line, a Roman architect specialized in prison architecture, survives an attack. Despite a shot to the back of his head, he survives, with a bullet in his skull and a great desire: to understand the reasons for terrorism and the meaning, if any, of violence as a form of struggle.»
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These diaries, written within the intimacy of the four walls, reveal the latent vitality of writings that at first glance are considered low but hide an involuntary quality in testimony and language. This quality is certainly also present among the many online diaries that no one, until today, has archived. We deduce that, on one hand, simple web diaries to become history must be carefully sifted and analyzed, as not all intimate and personal stories have historical literary quality; on the other hand, that the online writings of writers, by definition, have literary quality. To understand, always partially, what has happened and is happening in the Web of architectural writings on this theme, between diary and zibaldone, I return to two missed interviews.
The first, to a simple Web diarist, Fabrizio Mirabella, who recounts his experience as a neo-architect in Africa and later as an employee at the technical office of his hometown, Eboli. The second to Francesco Pecoraro, an architect-writer who used the blog as a zibaldone, his book, La vita in tempo di pace (Life in Time of Peace), was nominated for the Strega Prize in 2014 and was the winner of the Mondello and Volponi Prizes.
July 10, 2024
Intersections ---> MONDOBLOG
2 collective interview, Bruce Sterling: Ci salverà l'ingenuità, (Naivety will save us), La Stampa, January 25, 2013
3 a show where a comedian usually stands up - hence the term stand-up - and addresses the audience in the absence of the fourth wall
4 for further information on the subject, I refer to the critical texts of reference, notably among all (Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen, Milan, 1997, Apogeo) and in reference to Italian events (Giuseppe Granieri, Blog generation, Rome-Bari, 2005, Laterza) and (Fabio Metitieri, Il grande inganno del Web 2.0 (The great deception of Web 2.0), Rome-Bari, 2009, Laterza)
5 was an Austrian art historian (1858-1905) who developed the theory of values described at the beginning of the 1900s; see Alois Riegl: theory and practice of the conservation of monuments. Antologia di scritti, discorsi, rapporti 1898-1905 (Anthology of writings, speeches, reports 1898-1905), Bologna, 1995, CLUEB
6 it originates from an idea in 1984 by Saverio Tumino, a journalist and writer, who founded in Pieve Santo Stefano, a small town in the province of Arezzo, the archive of autobiographical and narrative diaries, where part of the Italian collective and individual memory is preserved uncensored.
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