Net Rhetoric

Yeah, sure we’re not entirely confident we know what weblogs are. They can be defined semi-technically by talking about technology that enables people to post frequent updates to a personal site without having to know anything (or much) about the Web’s infrastructure. But that’s like defining novels by talking about how they’re printed and maybe adding that they tend to be at least 150 pages long. The question is: What are we going to do with this technology? What are we going to write on those blank pages? And the answer is: We don’t know because we – all of us – are still making it up.

This is far from the first time the Net has invented (or enabled the invention of) new literary, rhetorical forms. Email has its own rhetoric. So do discussion boards, chat, instant messaging, mail lists. Even FAQs are new to the world as a literary device. Of course you can find precedents for each of these. Of course none is a radical break with previous literary forms. But rhetorical innovation is always based in, and depends on, the existing structures of discourse. Otherwise it’s what we technically call “gibberish.”

The rapid evolution of new forms of rhetoric results from the new forms of human connection the Net allows, for rhetoric is the “how” of connection. It is not a mere flourish decorating human sociality. It is how we’re social. And since humans are social animals, new rhetoric and new literary forms are a reinvention of what it means to be human.

Of course, this still doesn’t tell us what weblogs are, or, more important, what they will be.

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