WALKSCAPE
Crosswave EditionWhen a Daegu Book Drive Brought Our Blog Neighbors Together
2010-01-01
When I read something I wrote in the late 2000s, I remember the atmosphere before I remember the details. The internet I knew then was slow and often awkward to use. A small group of people could still get to know one another there well enough to meet.
Our paths crossed in comments and guestbooks. After enough of those visits, it felt natural to talk about doing something together in person.
This is my account of the 2009 book drive at the Daegu SOS child protection center.
When a blog neighbor could be a neighbor
I started a Tistory blog in 2008 and soon had what we called blog neighbors. We left comments on one another’s posts, signed guestbooks and picked up a subject where somebody else had left it. A handle could become familiar enough that I had an idea of the person’s tastes before I had heard their voice.
Bloggers in Seoul often wrote about getting together. I remember reading those posts in Daegu and wishing distance did not make it quite so difficult to go along.
Then a project came together in Daegu. A group blog had been collecting donated books, and on Saturday, September 26, 2009, we went to deliver them to the SOS child protection center.
Putting people to familiar names
The center was close to where I lived. I rode there with the blogger Hamcha Gajok, and Yunbbo joined us on the way. Adios and Beongeori Naenggaseum were already there when we arrived.
I knew some of the handles well. Meeting the people who used them was still strange for a minute. The boxes gave us a reason to get past introductions quickly.
At first I took the two people opening the gate for staff at the center. They were fellow bloggers. We greeted one another, spoke briefly with the director and started carrying things upstairs.
Carrying the books upstairs
We were there to move the donated books to the third-floor library.
There were more than ten boxes. We carried them up the stairs in trips, until the small room had more books in it than it had places ready to put them.
Adios suggested clearing the existing books off the shelves and sorting those as well. An afternoon spent delivering books became an afternoon reorganizing a library.
We sorted them by the ages of the people who would read them.
The youngest children’s books went on the bottom, with the primary school books above them, then books for middle school readers and adults.
Sorting took longer than moving the boxes. By then we were talking as we worked, and it was easy to forget that some of us had met that day.
An afternoon that kept going
When the shelves were finished we took a group photograph. It felt odd and good to see people I knew from different corners of the internet in the same picture.
Some went home. A few stayed for tea. The last three of us walked through Dongseong-ro, quoting a line from the Korean comedy show Gag Concert that we all knew. We kept using it until the repetition became its own joke.
That walk is one of the parts I remember most clearly.
The bloggers who took part
When the drive made the local news
The book drive later appeared in local coverage from NoCut News, with a photograph from the center. Our names and blogs were not printed. I still remember feeling a little proud to see an afternoon we had put together turn up in the news.
The report noted how quickly the online group had collected hundreds of books and how the people who organized it had actually met to deliver them.
How many books came in
The organizers prepared the drive over about a hundred days and collected books over thirty. More than thirty people took part, and 362 books came in, from children’s stories to literature and study guides.
A second drive brought in more than five hundred books. I could not get to that one, but I liked knowing that the first afternoon had become something people wanted to do again.
Looking back at the people who were there
The web I use now works much more quickly. What I miss about that particular corner of the old one is how long we spent getting to know the names that kept turning up.
A few lines in a comment eventually became a shared afternoon. We carried heavy boxes, walked through the city and went back to reading each other’s blogs afterward.
I can still find some of those posts. They remind me how the people on a screen became people I had actually spent time with.
For me, that is what remains of that early blog community: knowing who was behind a name when it appeared again.