Blood on blogs
My friend Rebecca Blood has a piece on blogs in The Guardian that tries to shift our enthusiasms about weblogs. I’m not entirely convinced by it.
She starts by saying that “no one really understands weblogs.” Fair enough.
She then puts holes in those who have described weblogs in “outrageously overblown terms”:
Enthusiasm abounds. Bloggers enjoy describing themselves as pioneers, though their ideas of innovation are sometimes suspect. “We are writing ourselves into existence,” some ecstatically proclaim, as if Pepys and Boswell and the historic legions of their fellow journal-writers had never existed.
As the guy who said “We are writing ourselves into existence,” I should maybe point out that I didn’t say that this was the first time we’ve ever done so. But I do believe that the Web is a new public space and weblogs enable us — all of us, not just the Pepyses and Boswells among us — to construct public selves in that space. So, what’s not new: Creating public selves. What is new: Doing so in this new public space and doing so primarily via written text, as opposed to via speech, writings, body language, clothing, etc. (On the other hand, I proudly admit to being way too enthusiastic about the Web and blogging.)
Then Rebecca dismisses those who “can conceive of weblogs only in terms of their own experience.” “A weblog is something fundamentally new,” she writes, and “those who try to define the phenomenon in terms of current institutions are completely missing the point.” (But if weblogs are something so fundamentally new that they bear no resemblance to current institutions, then why is the enthusiasm overblown? Aren’t we indeed pioneers?)
Then Rebecca explains the thing that she says no one has understood: Weblogs are, she says, “participatory media,” as opposed to either “passive news consumption” or broadcasting. Definitely, but I don’t think that’s enough to explain the thing that no one understands, that “no one can quite put their finger on…” We’ve had participatory media before — letter writing, CB radio, radio talk shows — but there’s something distinctive about the blogging form of participatory media. IMO, to see what’s distinctive about them, we should look at stuff like: their conversational nature, the way their dailyness requires anticipatory forgiveness of lapses in typing and thought, their embracing of the distinctiveness of voice, and, yes, the way blogs create public selves. That sort of thing. Of course, that’s really just to say that I would have written a different article than Rebecca, not a very useful comment.
Then she ends on terms that seem as overblown as the ones she criticizes:
…weblogs have changed personal publishing so profoundly that the old rules no longer apply. We are at the beginning of a new age of online publishing – and I predict that this generation of online pamphleteers is just the first wave.
Online pampleteers? I don’t want to make too much of this phrase since Rebecca had to wrap up somehow and probably didn’t want to say “participatory media” again. But pamphlets??
So, the take away is, I think: The enthusiasm for blogging is misplaced. Blogs are in fact a new form, called participatory media, that will change online publishing forever.
If I got that right, then I respectfully disagree with Rebecca; I think “participatory media,” while useful, takes us only some of the way towards understanding blogs. But I certainly agree that we haven’t understood blogging yet. That’s precisely why we should be encouraging a diversity of enthusiasms.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
When Rebecca talks about pamphlets, I think she’s referring to the great American tradition that helped found the country. Think Thomas Paine, not the New England Association of Dentists Opposing Tooth Decay.
Rebecca on Weblogs
Rebecca Blood a proposito di weblog : A weblog is something fundamentally new.
I’d disagree with you in two places, David — first, when you undercut your lovely riff on what’s distinctive about weblogs. There’s a world of stuff in there! =}
And second on pamphlets. What’s a pamphlet, after all? They’re passionate, topical, argumentative *unbound* publications, what you might call “loosely joined”!
I took Rebecca as referring to the 18th century pamphleteers, along the lines that Dan Bricklin talks about them. But, tellingly, Dan was talking about this before blogs. What’s exciting to me about blogs is precisely not that they let more us write pamphlets or columns but the sort of social nets they initiate, invigorate and instantiate.
It seems to me that talking about blogs as pamphlets highlights them as static broadcasts, not as the sort of interactive media as Rebecca describes them in the rest of her column. That’s all I meant.
Don’t blogs, and the collective act of blogging, collapse time (notably, the speed of distribution of ideas ) and “space” (the scope and reach of the distribution of those ideas) in a way that no other participatory medium ever has ?
And the fact that there’s a “Save” function, that whatever is on a blog remains there for anyone to read (or use, by commenting on it, by incorporating it into their expression of ideas or adding to it) as long as the blog remains hosted somewhere – isn’t that different, as well ? Libraries, both public and private, were “Save” functions, if you will, but they too are somehow different than the ubiquitous and always-on access to blogs via the Internet.
And, the dynamics of distribution and interaction are different, I think. Journals and books, in times past, were passed around differently, more slowly, and almost by definition, one person at a time (at best, a small group, such as a book club or salon). And, if one publication became all the rage, everyone talked about it by word-of- mouth. Spreading the word from Boston to Paris, for example, and to a relatively wide audience, would probably be measured in weeks, if not months. Pre-Internet, newspapers arrived from other parts of the world via airplane, sure – but how many people in Boston and New York read Le Monde, or the Independent or Guardian – and what about pre-airplane?
Each advance in connection and communication has sped things up, but I think there’s an order of magnitude difference occurring with blogs.
Blog content can go in many different directions at more or less the same time, and create rapid feeback loops differently than those (much slower) loops might have been created pre-Internet.
The fact that blogs are persistent and public and full of voice and linked and conversational and informal and written every day…yeah, that’s some of what makes them different as a participatory medium.
Though, if I’m really going to be picky, I actually think talking about the Web and blogs as media obscures something. Media are things you send messages through. The Web is something that we enter. A little difference that’s a big difference, IMO.
Yeah… a space, or a field, or a plane – somethng we enter. I remember a long-ago post of yours when you were wondering out loud about that.
Are you saying that if the Web is something like those, blogs also are that because the Web is the only place they can be, or are blogs a medium for use in that “something we can enter” ?
Is there a name for the points where a filament of a spider’s web joins another filament (I don’t think it’s “node” but I can’t think of anything else at the end of a long day)? If we concentrate on the individual human voice, as opposed to corporate/organizational web sites and the linked enterprise systems and such, are blogs the “nodes” that allow the Web of human voice to link itself into being ?
Blogs are an instance of “publicy” – the McLuhan reversal of “privacy” – that occurs under the intense acceleration of instantaneous communications. Our notion of privacy was created as an artifact of literacy – silent reading lead to private interpretation of ideas that lead to private thoughts that lead to privacy. Blogging is an “outering” of the private mind in a public way (that in turn leads to the multi-way participation that is again characteristic of multi-way instanteous communictions.) Unlike normal conversation that is essentially private but interactive, and unlike broadcast that is inherently not interactive but public, blogging is interactive, public and, of course, networked – that is to say, interconnected.
There are many other aspects to, and instances of, publicy besides blogging, of course. But blogging is perhaps the most vivid example of publicy of mind that represents the outering of stream of consciousness or inner dialogue.
The retrieval of pamphleteers (not pamphlets themselves, but the people and the act of pamphleteering) is particularly interesting, as it was the pamphleteers all the way back to the 16th century who were agitators for societal change in everything from educational policy to government. Given the effects of bloggers that we have observed over the past couple of years (eg. blogs used to give a new dimension of participation in an expanded classroom, the fate of Sen. Lott, the Howard Dean Experience) the retrieval strikes me as particularly apt.
Jon, I think of blogs as way that we’re present in the Web’s public space. I happen to think that they’re a particularly important way since they have the sort of persistence required to establish a public self.
Mark, how interesting! I’ve been thinking of blogs as a type of “social reading” that reverses the solitude that we associate with reading, but I’d forgotten McLuhan’s very important point that reading (roughly) created innerness and privacy in the first place. (I remember McLuhan talking about reading as a type of “riddling,” a guessing.) I think your McLuhanian interpretation works quite nicely here.
As for pamphleteers and pamphleting: Sure, blogs serve that function, but so did web pages before them. What is distinctive of blogs are the dimensions you discuss in your first two paragraphs.
The first time I read Mark’s newish book, McLuhan for Managers, I was thinking about blogs, but not as attentively as I might have – and the retrieval of pamphleteering is good strong evidence of one of the 4 laws of media in action.
I’m gonna go and play with the tetrad analysis, using blogging as the input.
just to be clear: my intention wasn’t to shift anyone’s enthusiasms, nor was it to dismiss anyone’s personal experience of weblogs. I was just trying, in 600 words, to illustrate that everyone tends to experience blogging in their own way, and that describing blogging in those (necessarily) limited terms always will miss important parts of the equation.
I strongly believe that decribing weblogs as a new form of this, or another form of that will always be too limiting. (my reference to pamphleteers at the end–while one of *my* favorite metaphors for the new form–was deliberately ironic. my husband told me that no one would get the joke. ;)
anyway, thanks for your comments on the piece. and please, everyone, keep talking. the conversations here are always worth the time.
Reactions to Rebecca Blood’s Guardian article
Here are a couple of reactions to the Rebecca Blood article I posted about yesterday. First, Doc Searls points out how hard it is to explain or define what a weblog is, but then offers up his own description: To…
The participatory media you refer to – letter writing, CB radio, radio talk shows – have no inherent memory (stream of constancy?) and no “linkability”. Blogs provide a linkable stream, meaning that I can make a comment about what you said, while referencing your comment.
If I had a comment the next day about something you said on a radio talk show the day before, I would be out of luck. However, I am obviously commenting now on what you blog said, an I can reference you on mine. And I can say a lot more, and think clearly while I’m doing it, than my 2 minute blurb on the radio. And I can think about what I say, even rescind it later, unlike the letter I just mailed.
all of the above and …
the web is more embodied.
its not just a public self …
its a virtual body.
As you know (because we’ve discussed this before), I have strongly mixed ideas about the bodily nature of the Web. So, I’d love to hear you discourse more about the way in which the virtuality of a virtual body doesn’t suck all the bodiness out of the body…
McLuhanisms: “Publicy”
The University of Toronto’s McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology has an interesting piece today on blogging and "publicy" — the latter being Marshall McLuhan’s "opposite" of privacy. Unlike normal conversation that is ess…
“The Web will have its greatest impact as an idea” – David Weinberger.
If blogs are a means of articulating, transmitting and playing with ideas virtually, do they create real impact on incarnate behaviour ?
Sorry … dumb question on my part. Just trying to wrap my head around your challenge – and not doing a very good job at it so far.
From Mayer Spivack’s very interesting post on Six Stages in the Life Cycles of Communications Channels, at
http://artsandminds.typepad.com/artsandminds/2003/12/five_stages_in_.html
“Before the third and fourth stage can develop and mature, we must invent and develop some way of replicating the associative process of the human brain and mind within the lexical ‘blog-space’ of the internet. To be most useful, web-log-space must eventually replicate mind-space, and it must be able to interconnect the minds, thoughts and ideas of all who use web logs and the internet, and do it rapidly and easily, without barriers or commercial franchise. Because web logs are constructed with word-based content (even a single word could, in practice represent a posting), and are not dependent upon bunches of intervening HTML code, the web log will be much more efficient at optimizing this kind of associative connection among individuals and organizations—and within organizations than anything we have experienced before.”
Speaking of the associative nature of weblog space, and its possible replication of mind and mental processes, McLuhan talks about the computer network as the extension of our central nervous system. He notes, “Having extended or translated our central nervous system into the electromagnetic technology, it is but a further stage to transfer our consciousness to the computer world as well.” (UM 60) Consider, then, what emerges from the network of weblogs, with their interconnections via permalinks, trackbacks and comments. In certain cases, it is truly an awareness that borders on consciousness – one that results in reflexive movement in the corporeal world.
What is particularly interesting to me is the magnitude of effect that has emerged from this weblog-induced reflexive action that far exceeds the weblog’s general adoption and acceptance among the general public. This indicates a tremendous potency that is mostly unseen and ignored by most; an indication of strong ground effects if there ever was one!
Rebeca Blood is right, when she say the blog is what we percept from it. Think just when you read by browsing, or when you watching the blogs via filtered RSS feeds. Two different aspect of the same thing. The first show the identity, the second not, and if we look forward, I think we will see that the real thing is the post not the blog. The blog is created and delivered by softwares, witch can manage and manipulate the posts in many ways. The programs evolve, managing text, picture, video, streaming video are or will be the content of the posts, and the way we use and manage them will dramaticly change.