An article from the NY Times about collaborative journals -Deepest Thoughts on World Tour. I am going to try and start one of these journals and send it around to friends and acquaintances.
Here are two projects in progress:
Sight Unseen Journals
1000 Journals
Excerpts from article:
The practice of sending a message in a bottle has gone out of fashion, lost to the decline in ocean travel and rise of surer methods of communicating. But the impulse to reach out to strangers has not disappeared. It has lately resurfaced in the form of an elaborate type of Internet-based game.
...
Combining the worldwide reach of the Net with old-fashioned writing, drawing, pasting, wrapping and sending by conventional mail, the traveling journals are modern, loosely organized games of message in a bottle. They offer people a chance to cast out their feelings, their wisdom and their secrets, and in so doing, to ease their loneliness and reach out to worlds beyond their own."There is this belief that the Internet has killed off note keeping, and it's really not true," said Ms. Rothke, a freelance writer and writing teacher who called the combination of the Net and "a notebook floating around" "the best of both worlds."
....
"It is a relatively new phenomenon," said Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, a historian and futurist at the Institute for the Future, a research organization in Silicon Valley. Cyberspace used to be considered an alternate dimension, he said. Now, with the proliferation of cellphones, BlackBerrys and other wireless devices, that alternate dimension has begun to meld with everyday life. "It's a move away from talking about that information as separate from the physical world," Dr. Pang said.
