Comments versus Conversation, Written vs. Spoken

“Poets often write prose simply for the love of writing”, says Robert Peake when talking about the prose versus poetry versus other communication in writing things, such as blogs and letters:

a letter from John Keats would contain, according to Motion, “freely associating inquiry and incomparable verve and dash–a headlong charge in which jokes, anecdotes, ‘little bits of news’, snatches of bawdy, imitations of comic Shakespearian garrulity, mockery and gossip are swirled together with poetic ‘axioms’ and subtle deliberations.” This sounds a lot like blogging to me.

Blogs as used as a magazine, therapist, lightbox, screambox, project outbox speakers corner, press release hub, research articles, forum for family discussion, instead of fw emailed jokes, portfolio, parlour, jot notepad, and what have you. Some sign the pledge to Blog with Integrity, others don’t see themselves as citizen journalists, just getting by and just saying.
Is each thing made public, made for the public as a fully refined complete? Once something passes the typing fingers, the lips, or the fleeting facial expression, it’s out there.
Would that hold true for casual speech in private as well as for public discourse speech and for privately shared and publicly written text?
How much care is useful and what is being cautious for loss instead of gain?
A grammatical mistake as a remnant from cutting and pasting is like a stutter of um, ah, or sentence trailing off, or reversal in spoken speech. Not smooth, a bump in flow, what you can latch onto or screen out. But text has the advantage that you can fix those things.
Is sloppy, misspeak, mistype, mistake, more trustworthy than the perfectly polished surface with just as much between the lines messes?
Text isn’t only preconceived thought. There are places and times to be diligent. Text can eb on the fly, faster than tongue in some cases, dealing in gist.
And spoken word isn’t only improv but can be practiced and smooth, never saying anything you don’t mean and being weighed and articulated clearly.
That runs alongside the idea that the blogging medium encourages unconsidered comments whereas other types of typing makes you consider what you’re saying before you move your fingers.
Because blogs value the page real estate of the top of the page (and then that is item is moved out of the slot for the next thing) doesn’t need to put pressure on speed. It does. True, should a bunch of people speech at once, to dialogue, asynchronous loses. But to jump in can be in your own leisure. One can take a deep breath and be self-aware and others-aware before saying a thing. And one can dig back just like one can refer back in speech to earlier conversations. Because you have what was said verbatim.
People who have good recall can pull up verbatim quotes to “but you said” on such date and time, suchnsuch in a way that other can with a typed script. It is a matter of will and intention more than medium.
Is the real difference visual versus auditory?
When writing, one may have the luxury to consider what one says before saying, but the same is true with speech. One may speak in heat or wait.
Some people don’t open their mouths until they have weighed the value of what they have said against the value of silence or possible miscommunications, others blather to fill time. It’s not the fault of the medium of tongue if there’s a heated word.
Either policy for communicating may say things of value or make mistakes in judgement. It isn’t the medium of tongue nor type.
Poetry can be first thought best thought, or have the life worked out of it by editing, or preserve that intensity of messy jangled life, or take something that is polished and mess with it until it reflects a value of “real” symbolized by its mussed look, it’s lack of clear closure and pointing standing in for the worldview that life is not dovetailed purpose but one damn thing after another. If your worldview is founded around the notion that each thing leads to a predestinated next, a gift from a deity, you might want to create poetry, utterances, written and spoken that reflect an echo of order, morality, balance.
Neither blog nor speech need be a formal structure essay or debate with thesis and backed up points, reinforced footnotes of references of authority and proofs to call up. Either can be. Conversations with some can be like that but it isn’t the only way and perhaps, due to the amount of labour that need go into the smallest of point, it shuts down the exploration of ideas, closes out voices not wearing proper debate attire, or having a spot of mispunctuation on its shirtfront that might be leapt on as proof of weak arguments all around. Or (to go back to Patti Digh‘s “Well, honey, what else might be true? “) with a willing partner the dance can go on for hours of delight of someone being able to joyfully navigate within those desired parameters.
Perhaps the method of argue an ironclad perspective works and makes sense for some. Is it from a games mentality of winning rather than of listening and sharing? Or it is not the rules but how one uses them?