Blogs as public diaries: writing for an audience

This morning I went to a great presentation at Helsinki Design Lab (HDL) on the research they are doing in the field of strategic design. During the presentation, Bryan Boyer, who was our host at HDL,  made an interesting comment who highlighted the importance of writing mechanisms.
Discussing artifacts the design team used, Bryan explained how their website, and in particular their blog had become a communication artifact. They are posting a weekly (sometimes) bi-weekly post, posts that he described as " a diary of our work". He noted how writing these posts helped him to think about,  articulate and reflect on his work [great reference to the reflecting and analyzing mechanism].

He also added how it was important to make these notes public on the blog rather than just writing them down as private notes. Indeed, when you write on a blog, you write for an audience and you have to think about the audience [Here I could not prevent myself from smiling and thinking about the addressing mechanism]. While written for others (he blog is public and shared with others with an "open door" to conversations - through the comment feature), posts are also written for oneself: to keep a trace and make sense of what was done, what happened. Objectifying here is both the output and the process.

Not only I found this reference to the blog as a diary of the work of the Helsinki Design Lab relevant in the context of the 4 mechanisms of writing we defined in our book, but also it reminded me of the distinction made between letters and diaries made by Joanne Trautmann Banks about Virginia Woolf's correspondence and diaries.  Trautmann Banks made a point that letters revealed more about Virginia Woolf's because they were addressed to someone (and public to a certain extent).

This book started as a conversation.... Why is writing seen as the "ugly ducking?"

We are both very excited by the forthcoming publication of our book with Routledge The Power of Writing in Organizations: From Letters to Online Interactions.
We believe it provides key insights on how writing's mechanisms is crucial in today's organizations where distributed collaboration is increasing and where there is a crucial need for creative thinking.

This book started as a conversation about debates in the academic worlds about the effects of technology on communication as well as our observations in our teaching and everyday life. On the one hand, we are writing more and more: post-it notes, emails, instant messaging, power point decks, and even texting on our phones rather than calling, yet, there is a disregard towards writing and a belief that face-to-face or variations of face-to-face like videos are better than writing for collaboration and relations.

We paused and wondered: Why this tension? Why is writing always seen as the ugly duckling when it comes to expressions of subtle emotions or complicated thoughts. Maybe it is because we are both academics, maybe it is because we have both been reading and writing for so many years, yet there is more than a personal story and our own biases.

We thought of specific examples that we knew: correspondences of famous philosophers, scientists and novelists - Descartes, Darwin, Einstein, Kafka, or Virginia Woolf - and we started reading them and analyzing them to figure out how writing supported the expression of emotions, the development of ideas and the building of relationships. We also discovered correspondences of many less famous ones which have been kept and played a key role in the development of distributed organizations such as Hudson Bay Company and East India Company.

Our reading of scholars in classical studies such as Ong and Havelock showed us the importance of the development of the alphabet and writing in Ancient Greece in the development of the thinking process as we experienced it. This was confirmed by the fascinating work of psychologists such as Maryanne Wolf who showed how the development of writing influenced the structure of our brains and allowed us to develop analytical and creative powers.

We then went from the historical correspondences to current online communities - Open Source, OpenIDEO and a public forum on Knowledge Management - to see what has changed. We realized that successful collaborations in these online contexts could be explained with the same mechanisms of writing than in the historical letters from the 17th, 18, 19th and beginning of the 20th century. This was really exciting and it confirmed our belief that writing was a powerful mode of communication, crucial for the expression of emotions, the development of new ideas and the building of relationships. It was also somewhat worrisome as most of the interviews we did with professional and managers showed that writing was becoming a weak mode of communication and with it, several key skills such as analysis, articulation of ideas, reflection - all crucial skills to thinking, were at the risk of disappearing. We do not think that technology does not allow us to use and develop these skills, but in many cases, it allows to be lazy and stop practicing them.

This book in that sense ends with a call for action: let's acknowledge what we can do with writing and let's cultivate it while enjoying all the potential unleashed by today's technology.