 My daughter spends much of her workday at the computer, but has no interest in blogging. Her hobby is scrapbooking,
a hobby that now supports a $2.5 billion industry. A scrapbook is
essentially a photo album on steroids, replete with souvenirs,
commentary, and now, special thematic papers to make your collage a
work of art. Special scissors are involved, as are many art media
(paint, chalk, etc.). Stores catering to the hobby are springing up
everywhere. People belong to scrapbooking circles (where you share your
technical skills in scrapbooking, more than the actual scrapbooking
content, with others), and are signing up for classes in scrapbooking
and attending scrapbookng conferences. There is a Scrapbooking for Dummies book.
Last week, during a delightful dinner with fellow Canadian bloggers Seb Paquet and Gary Lawrence Murphy, we talked a little about this, and my dinner companions defined the hobby as Blogging + Permanence. Where a blog consists of nothing but bits and is totally etherial, a scrapbook is tangible. It has heft. It has presence.
It is also a social hobby, far less solitary than blogging. Mothers and
daughters work on their scrapbooks together. And the subject matter is
much more personal than most bloggers' writings and photos (livejournal
bloggers excepted). This is perhaps because the privacy of scrapbooks allows
this intimacy -- no fear of stalkers stumbling on your scrapbook the
way they can on your blog. And scrapbookers are overwhelmingly female.
They are also, photobloggers aside, of a more artistic bent than the
vast majority of bloggers. The whole point of blogs was to make website
composition simpler, so the writer could concentrate on the words.
Scrapbooks are all about
composition, and that composition is getting more sophisticated all the
time. Some scrapbookers are even taking art classes so they can
supplement their photos with portraits and other works of art. The
hobby is even encroaching on genealogy, with much richer stories about,
and embellished with artefacts of, one's ancestors than one finds on
the usual 'bare' family tree.
I keep thinking there should be more overlap between the two hobbies,
but while there are lots of websites on how to scrapbook, there are
very few blogs devoted to scrapbooking (and those that are seem to have
mostly been abandoned, presumably so their writers can pursue their
favoured hobby instead). There is certainly a ready opportunity to
bring the hobbies together: Scanning the pages of a scrapbook into a
blog would not be difficult, and would create a backup copy of the
scrapbook that could be given to others or shared with those far away.
And if the blogging tools weren't so clumsy, they could allow us to
print out our blogs and preserve them, with some of the related
real-life scraps, the comments threads etc., in a hard copy archive
that those (like my father) who say they find reading online too hard
on the eyes could browse.
Why doesn't this happen? Probably because the content is different, and
the intended audience is different. The audience for your scrapbook
(besides yourself) is the person sitting beside you, commenting on each
page, sharing your art in a very tactile way. The audience for your
blog (besides yourself) is the vast, mostly unknown horde of readers
who find your ideas interesting, your compositions provocative or
inspiring, your information useful, but who, for the most part, won't
miss what you've written next week when it disappears into the
impenetrable blog archives. Blog posts are ephemeral, quick flashes,
fireworks, left brain stuff. Scrapbook pages are memories, permanent
vehicles to recall, richly, again and again, treasured memories. Drawing on the right side of the brain.
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