Welcome to Blogistan: Weblogs as a contemporary writing environment
Gary Thompson
SVSU
Draft version 7/6/04
I.
Weblogs (or blogs) hit public awareness a few years ago, when the web was still
a new thing, search engines were not particularly helpful, and when you turned
up something quirky and interesting, you wanted to share it with others. In
its purest form this kind of text shows up as a list of links, more or less
like the early blog Robotwisdom .These
blogs initially had to be done using HTML or web authoring software such as
Netscape Composer; they became much simpler with the creation of bloghosts such
as Pitas or Blogger, which furnish the basic code along with a choice of templates
and storage—for pay, for donations, for advertising, or for an entry to
sell more sophisticated software or larger storage space.
The index function represented by Robotwisdom merged in time with another on-line
phenomenon, the web journal, best represented by Livejournal,
which worked more or less as an on-line diary which could be made available
to officially designated friends (most of whom, of course, writers had never
met face to face). These two functions, web referencing and journaling, began
to merge about five years ago, so that the most common definition of a blog
now includes short, personal posts in reverse chronological order, with at least
some links included. Links change "writing," at the extremes, converting
one's own text into a patchwork of others' texts accessed by the "reader."
While some blogs are strictly private, most enable or encourage some form of
on-line community; and blogs have divided into several genres (personal, public
affairs, tech, and photo, to list four). (I will continue to talk about this
form of communication as writing, even though important aspects of it are visual—as
we talk about writing a screenplay, for example. Actually, there’s a case
to be made that important aspects of “writing” are gravitating toward
design, but that’s a topic for another occasion.)
A common metaphor in use for on-line is to think of it as geographical space
(we speak of going on-line, use the terms cyberspace, surfing the web, looking
at site maps, and so on), and in this spirit some of those heavily invested
in on-line discourse began to speak of their exchanges—probably influenced
by the buildup toward war in the Middle East--as Blogistan. It’s an ugly
term, well worth passing into the cyberdustbins of history unlamented, but I
sent it in as my title, so there it is . . . My presentation will focus on two
aspects of blogging as it connects with contemporary writing: general ways in
which material differences in technology influence writing, and specific illustrations
for how these have played out.
II.
I approach this topic as an academic working in areas affiliated with rhetoric,
which in the American context means I teach writing and certain perverse approaches
to literature. Additionally, I offer two classes for my university’s communications
/ multimedia program, one of which is in the area of information design. Several
years ago I began to ask students in both writing and web design classes to
pay some attention to blogs. Those in classes pertaining to information design
I have asked to keep blogs about web design, and to note ways in which blogs
tie into social networks; those in writing classes have used blogs as journal
space for informal writing and exchanges with others. When I have asked students
to read around in blogs, without further direction, they are less than overwhelmed
by the quality of what they read. They tell me that at least 95% of the writing
to be found on blogs is crap; my response is that at least 95% of all writing
is crap, only most writers do not publish and distribute their drafts, and have
to negotiate a series of filters, in the form of agents, acquisitions editors,
copy editors, reviewers, the occasional academic or cultural critic, and whoever
screens books for Oprah. Bloggers have mostly said good-bye to all that. The
result is a writing environment which places writer and audience (a better term
here than “reader”) in closer contact, enabling in some cases rapid
feedback and a stronger sense of live performance—and its corollary, ephemerality.
In shifting at least partially from a print culture to an on-line culture, we
are losing some capability of keeping archives. Nicholson Baker several years
ago lamented the loss of material card catalogs with their yellowing card stock
and accretions of librarians’ notes, as these are largely replaced by
searchable electronic versions. Something like this loss of material culture
goes on with on-line discourse, as (for example) electronic documents may not
be preserved, may be edited later to fit what writers and institutions wish
they had said (cf.
New York Post headline on 7/6 announcing Dick Gephardt as Kerry's
vice-presidential choice), or may be maintained in obsolete format (as reportedly
has happened with electronic communications of the Reagan administration). There’s
no problem with physical storage of on-line texts, as there would be with paper:
this issue is more one of obsolete software, cataloging, and access to the specific
bit you want. Archive.org can only do
so much. On the other hand, newsworthy items, humorous or bizarre reports, or
other memes can find very rapid, worldwide distribution on-line, as the Iraqi
torture photos show. With more than two million weblogs in existence, one of
the basic problems in considering weblogs as a writing environment is simply
registering the scale of the phenomenon. There’s no way that I can know
that what I say is generally true. But the vast numbers of blogs show that there
is a tremendous interest among the general population in having their say, however
unlikely it is that they will be read by more than a few others. Weblogs provide
at least the potential for many people to write and be read who could not otherwise
do so.
Blogs are a subset of the online environment generally. Electronic texts including
Usenet, IRC, chat, bulletin boards, e-mail, personal and professional web pages,
MUDs, and interactive computer games have been supposed to be affecting reading
for over a decade now. A few tentative themes: these texts are often performative,
with writers assuming personae which may or may not resemble their off-line
names or other characteristics; they are more rapidly interactive than print
(which requires weeks, months, or years for feedback from audiences to register);
they are intensely intertextual, drawing on in-group allusions and jargon, not
to mention the technology itself, as the basis of bonding within a virtual community
which can be strongly felt even in the absence of physical proximity. Within
these general statements about on-line environments, there are still profound
differences: gaming, for example, as a medium is highly immersive, inviting
close concentration within that medium, whereas those taking part in more text-based
media such as most blogs, forums, chat, e-mail and the web are likely to multitask--a
less immersive way of engaging the medium. Blogs themselves divide into genres
with profound differences. This divided attention marks a substantial difference
in the “writing environment” from print media, and is likely to
be generational (i.e., those who have grown up with computers commonly respond
very differently from those in an older cohort). Cf. Manovich: for those born
after about 1970, depending on location, class, and other factors, the computer
has become a cultural interface, a universal filter for how we perceive culture
(64). Manovich is rather negative about this:
Traditionally, texts encoded human knowledge and memory, instructed,
inspired, convinced, and seduced their readers to adopt new ideas, new ways
of interpreting the world, new ideologies. While it is probably possible to
invent a new rhetoric of hypermedia that will use hyperlinking not to distract
the reader from the argument (as is often the case today), but rather to further
convince her of an argument’s validity, the sheer existence and popularity
of hyperlinking exemplifies the continuing decline of the field of rhetoric
in the modern era. (76-77)
I’m pretty much in agreement, except that I see rhetoric
as adapting rather than declining: we no more encounter texts outside of rhetoric
than outside of ideology, and for similar reasons—we live inside of assumptions
about how our cultures communicate.
Edgar Allan Poe argued in “The Philosophy of Composition”
that aesthetic unity in anything longer than a short story was impossible, on
the grounds that longer works could not be read in a sitting, and the affairs
of the world would necessarily intrude. The writing environment for on-line
composition is perhaps at the diametric opposite from Poe’s preferred
state of reading, as readers encounter distraction as a necessary component
of the medium. Writers and readers of weblogs (as with other texts) are the
same people, and perhaps more consciously construct performing selves as a way
of managing identity in off-line and on-line domains.
While the essence of most blogs is to point elsewhere, some are essentially
on-line journals, with little evident need to link to other sites. Linkage defines
the degree and nature of virtual community. At one extreme, a blog becomes so
interlinked as to have almost no original content, only textual fingers pointing
elsewhere, to other sites including but not limited to bloggers; at the other
extreme, the blog is entirely about itself rather than about directing the presumed
audience elsewhere. It might be thought of as a matter of permeability: early,
business-oriented discussions of the on-line environment emphasized stickiness
or devices meant to keep audiences at that site as opposed to others; blogs,
especially the most permeable ones, are meant to keep audiences coming back
at intervals to find what is new and different. (One example would be the collective
blog Metafilter.)
The web is a “pull” medium, meaning that audiences are drawn by
what they want to find, not by what others want to push at them—that is
precisely what people resent about spam, that it pushes appeals for cheap mortgages
and penis enlargement at them rather than allowing them to seek these benefits
out for themselves (which of course few of us would do).
The web is a composite medium, combining verbal and visual elements as do magazines,
but also making available animation (via Flash), sound, and video (limited by
bandwidth and specific software choices). Most audiences are willing to accept
(diminishing) delays in access and quality of images, particularly with video,
for this flexibility. The web also is different from print in being interactive,
allowing users to partially shape the experience of reading by selecting specific
portions, branching internally or externally, re-ordering the text to some extent.
Weblogs do not often take advantage of all these potentials, but they exist
in a textual environment which does—and one function of blogs, particularly
collective ones such as Metafilter and
BoingBoing, is to highlight the best
of the web. They epitomize the web’s motif of contagion, whereby
phrases, ideas, and news stories circulate even more rapidly than they did when
television was the new thing. These units of contagion are referred to (in a
term coined by Richard Dawkins) as memes, and weblogs trade in memes drawn from
the web generally. Memes are the currency of public-issue blogs: the most valuable
ones serve to introduce memes, as opposed to reflecting them a few days later.
Memes can be traced by means of indexes such as the invaluable Blogdex
created by Cameron Marlow, a grad student at MIT’s Media Lab, as a means
of tracing social networks.
Another feature of blogs which should be mentioned is that they can enable very
rapid feedback by readers. In some cases this feedback comes in the form of
other blogs which in referencing the original post can signal its author that
someone has linked to him (trackback). Some blogs are set up so as to permit
readers’ comments, and these are one of the primary draws to sites such
as Atrios and Daily
Kos, two US political blogs.
In the next section I want to look at a few examples of writers and uses for
blogs. Some of these take the form of cautionary tales, with others striking
more positive notes.
II. Illustrations
Writers who make use of weblogs—as opposed to bloggers who decide to
move into more a permanent genre, possibly one involving being paid for their
work--may initially risk coming across like the corporations that woke up about
1998 or so and decided, Hey, we need to go on-line too—creating push-type
web pages which did not draw audiences by what they wanted to find, but instead
assumed audiences who would already be interested in their content. Unfortunately,
that content often turned out to be a list of company divisions, photos of corporate
headquarters and officers, and the deathless prose of the mission statement.
. . . Previously published writers have set up blogs to allow their loyal fans
to know their travel schedule, books for sale, and so on, but these tend to
lack the energy and commitment and “touch” of successful blogs.
Here’s a web page
that illustrates the wrong way to go about blogging:
As you read further, you may note links--which, unfortunately, have mistakes
in the URLs: It’s livejournal, not “lifejournal”; the bloghost
is Blogger, while access to blogs is done through the Blogspot URL. Of the links
above, the last one is dead, the others are less than relevant. This post is
not only in bad taste, it’s technically useless. (accessed 6/9/04)
Some established writers see blogging as essentially parasitic or a drain on
time better spent writing. Andrei Codrescu, for example, said as much at a writer’s
conference (blogged [parasitically?] by Monica
and Stephen:
20031116
On Friday I went to a keynote address by Andrei Codrescu at the NC Writer's
Network Conference. Codrescu talked about the notion that "the reader
is dead." He claims that the reader is definitively not dead. Instead,
the forms of consumption have changed--writing has moved from print to internet
and also (especially) blogs--and the reader has moved with these changes.
The "reader" of literature, who can be distinguished from readers
of romance novels or historical non-fiction, primarily consumes the blog and
the online journal.
Codrescu considers bloggers "monologuers fed by weaker creatures,"
these weaker creatures being non-writers. True, anyone can have a blog and
spout opinions, and blogs widen the opportunity for (a diversity of) readership
drastically, but, as he even recognized, communities of bloggers tend to be
organized around a particularity—such as poetics. These groups that
are formed within the wider public sphere of “blog” tend, I think,
to separate the (mere) “monologuers” from those who serious artists
and critics.
Codrescu criticized the relentless nature of the weblog, the manner by which
bloggers are constantly online, attached to a keyboard. While berating the
ridiculous all-consuming nature of the blog, in terms of its sense of self-importance
and its time-commitment, Codrescu also recognized that the act of writing
itself is often narcissistic and relentless.
So is blogging any different than old-fashioned paper and pen or even composing
by computer? I think that the breakdown between blogs vs. writing for Codrescu
was a question of intent and art. For whom are bloggers actually writing?
Can a blog with its stripped-down graphics and bare appearance honor the writing
therewithin? What is the intent of the blog? Are bloggers more interested
in creating a community than making art?
Monica here digests and distributes a statement from (non-blogging) authority
about blogs, presenting rhetorical questions which are closely relevant to connections
between blogging and writing more generally. The presumed audience for Jeri
Magg’s post is not so thoughtful, taking blogs as something that “sounds
like fun!” Their blogs are essentially an extension of their self-promotion,
and don’t have any real impact on their writing. Several things are noteworthy
here: 1) the content of the post, passing along a serious writer’s opinion
about blogging as narcissistic 2) comments are reported neutrally, in a thoughtful
tone, rather than suggesting that Codrescu doesn’t know what he’s
talking about, although in this instance I believe that he doesn’t. 3)
The graphomania theme is echoed by other writer-bloggers.
Many writers making use of on-line environments are working in SF, for obvious
reasons. William Gibson is one of the the best-known contemporary SF writers,
with his 1984 novel Neuromancer credited for inventing the term cyberspace
and shaping much of the way that people have come to think of going on-line,
as a separate existence. In terms of blogging, Gibson doesn’t seem to
have been so enthusiastic. Having kept it up for nine months or so, he finally
concludes that it tends to get in the way of his real work.
posted 6:06 AM
LAST
POSTCARD FROM COSTA DEL BLOG
Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for
me to stop blogging.
I’ve found blogging to be a low-impact activity, mildly narcotic and
mostly quite convivial, but the thing I’ve most enjoyed about it is
how it never fails to underline the fact that if I’m doing this I’m
definitely not writing a novel – that is, if I’m still blogging,
I’m definitely still on vacation. I’ve always known, somehow,
that it would get in the way of writing fiction, and that I wouldn’t
want to be trying to do both at once. The image that comes most readily to
mind is that of a kettle failing to boil because the lid’s been left
off.
The bits and pieces that Joseph Cornell assembled in his shadow-boxes wouldn’t
have seemed nearly as interesting if he’d simply left them arrayed on
the bench of some picnic-table –- and they certainly wouldn’t
still be there.
I crave the sweet and crazy-making difficulties that can only be imposed by
the box, the Cornellian stage, the frame, of a formal narrative.
So I’m out of here, as of this installment, and wish to thank everyone
who in any way furthered my ‘tween-books holiday. It’s been ludic,
as the anarchist says.
Perhaps I’ll be back, one day, somewhere on the far side of whatever
it is I’m about to start writing.
Adios, then, to all.
And onward!
At least initially, Gibson is not tech-savvy enough to make his links into
links—instead, his first entry drops the URL in as plain-text. But even
if he does make his audience block-and-copy links. his reflections are worth
considering.
We live in, have lived through, a strange time. I know this because when
I was a child the flow of forgetting was relatively unimpeded. I know this
because the dead were less of a constant presence, then. Because there was
once no rewind button. Because the soldiers dying in the Somme were black
and white, and did not run as the living run. Because the world’s attic
was still untidy. Because there were old men in the mountain valleys of my
Virginia childhood who remembered a time before recorded music.
When we turn on the radio in a New York hotel room and hear Elvis singing
“Heartbreak Hotel”, we are seldom struck by the peculiarity of
our situation: that a dead man sings.
In the context of the longer life of the species, it is something that only
just changed a moment ago. It is something new, and I sometimes feel that,
yes, everything has changed.
(This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything
having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension
of my work.)
Our “now” has become at once more unforgivingly brief and unprecidently
elastic. The half-life of media-product grows shorter still, ‘til it
threatens to vanish altogether, everting into some weird quantum logic of
its own, the Warholian Fifteen Minutes becoming a quark-like blink. Yet once
admitted to the culture’s consensus-pantheon, certain things seem destined
to be with us for a very long time indeed. This is a function, in large part,
of the rewind button. And we would all of us, to some extent, wish to be in
heavy rotation.
And as this capacity for recall (and recommodification) grows more universal,
history itself is seen to be even more obviously a construct, subject to revision.
If it has been our business, as a species, to dam the flow of time through
the creation and maintenance of mechanisms of external memory, what will we
become when all these mechanisms, as they now seem intended ultimately to
do, merge?
The end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively
endless duration, an infinite digital Now. But then, again, perhaps there
is nothing new, in the end of all our beginnings, and the bison will be there,
waiting for us. [entire quote sic]
[http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.asp
]
A writer of SF more keen on the implications of on-line social
networking is Cory Doctorow. Doctorow is one of (I believe) four bloggers on
BoingBoing, which is either #1 or #2
in terms of popularity, depending on the week and the index consulted.
Here are a couple of sample posts.
These posts illustrate some connections with and differences from writing for
print. Lke print media, weblog posts are highly allusive—print is just
as intertextual as anything on-line, except that with on-line media you often
can access the text alluded to, or a text which glosses it, whereas with a traditional
print text you have to open another book, if you even have it available. The
second post directs us to one of the most popular, and rude, collective blogs,
Fark.com, which offers among its features
semi-regular Photoshop contests, in which participants are encouraged to take
digital images and modify them satirically—the post above was one such
instance, illustrating blogs’ openness to visual as well as verbal text.
Doctorow is outreach coordinator for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, one of the premier groups monitoring restrictions
on writing on-line. EFF has been instrumental in calling attention to a variety
of issues connected with censorship and restriction of the free flow of information.
That role has deepened his involvement with the social implications of the on-line
environment. Here's a link to a talk he gave: Talk
on June 28. He has been involved in testing out the concept of the creative
commons by making now two novels available to be read on-line gratis (at least
initially--these now are excerpts): Down
and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern
Standard Tribe[in progress]. Several themes in his novel reflect Doctorow’s
immersion in on-line environments: 1) characters’ most significant, almost
exclusive identities are based on IM-like communication, done pretty much non-stop;
2) in place of money, the economy runs on “Whuffie,” a kind of fluctuating
index of their reputation, as given on-line by others—friends, enemies,
strangers—which may be based on internet polls and similar measures; 3)
characters routinely upload their memories to storage, and periodically exchange
their bodies for cloned models—this process is as routine in the novel
as taking a shower; 4) those who get bored with living can “deadhead,”
i.e., simply persist in storage without any body for an indeterminate period
of time, then come back to see how the world has changed without them; 5) the
main conflict in the plot is between the narrator, who sides with those keeping
the Haunted Mansion running as Disney Imagineers constructed it in (relative)
antiquity, and a new crowd that has taken over the Hall of Presidents, installing
a new feature which implants their experiences directly into visitors’
brains (more or less as happens with Keanu Reeves in The Matrix). While
these and other features of the novel could have come about without significant
on-line involvement, the fictional version illustrates a kind of contagion from
electronic media to print.
SF writers may be a bit quicker to take to blogs: The environment is heavily
technologized, and it might almost be said that the internet grew out of SF
modes of imagination. Writers of other genres not so thematically oriented toward
technology are also making some use of blogs, drawing perhaps on their attractions
for graphomanes.
All author blogs are not in fact written by science fiction/fantasy writers
or by people who started out writing online. I discovered two this past week
via Pamie's blog: the very successful
Meg Cabot of Princess
Diaries fame and Caren Lissner,
a newcomer whose first novel, Carrie Pilby, comes highly recommended.
I must admit, Cabot's site has mostly persuaded me that I'm too old to be
her demographic (not a slam, just a fact -- she's good but I'm not her audience)
but I'm a bit in love with Lissner's. Anyone who starts the first several
weeks of her blog writing the same exact phrase every single day ("Woke
up, put clothes on, went to work.") has a wonderfully dry sense of humor.
And when she quotes a friend who wrote in to ask her to put more stuff in
her blog, she answers: "No." Heh. Fortunately, though the beginning
of her blog was a great piece of performance art, she has gradually included
more snippets and bits over the months so it's now a site worth return visits.
And honestly? That gimmick got me intrigued enough to do exactly what it was
intended to: I'm going to buy her book and read it.
Both Lissner and Cabot say the same thing about their blog writing, though.
Cabot said in her December 28th entry (no permalink, sorry) that she was discussing
with Susan Juby (another non-sf writer with a blog!) how difficult it is to
maintain a blog if you're a fiction writer. Because if you’re a novelist
AND a blogger, you’re always like, “Well, that funny thing that
happened to me would make a great blog. But it would also make a great scene
in a book.” So you’re always, “Do I blog about it? Or put
it in a book?” You can’t use it for BOTH (although I know probably
will, though I swear not on purpose).
And Lissner says (in her 7/27/03 entry ) that:
The reason I don't do a full-fledged blog is that I'm doing too much other
creative writing I don't want to take away from, and if I have an idea I want
to use in a future book, I don't want to spoil it by putting it in more raw
form here. But I may sometimes want to talk here anyway.
I know the feeling. When I was writing screenplays, this was no big deal.
I was hardly about to insert a scene from my own life into my scripts, they
were always larger than life. But now -- well, my current novel is far from
my life (me, a trapeze artist? Not quite), but my stories are closer. Much
closer. And who knows what my next novel will be? (Actually, I do know, and
yes, it bears some passing resemblance to people I've met at least once or
twice.) But that won't stop me from writing snippets of real life here. I
like to believe I have more stories in me than that. But something does hold
me back from writing more full autobiography in this space. I'm with Caren
Lissner on this; I don't want to take away from my other creative writing.
I never found personal essays took anything from my screenwriting, but they
do tap into the same back-of-my-brain awake-dreaming source as my prose fiction.
So yes, I think it's possible to blog and I hope blog enjoyably, but yet hold
something back for the other work.
Interesting to consider.
Posted by Tamar at January 12, 2004 09:29 PM | TrackBack
http://www.postcardsfromla.com/blog/archives/000449.html
Themes to note here: blogging is characterized as competitive with writing
for publication, because the sort of incidents which formerly functioned as
seeds for the imagination to turn over and eventually work into fiction have
two possible applications, one in the blog and one in the traditional use. However,
it is probably a matter of further application and adaptation rather than exclusion:
writers like Doctorow seem to function well in this environment, perhaps because
BoingBoing is collective and doesn’t (seem to) require that he post something
personally every day.
In addition to fiction writers and their tentative, exploratory relations with
blogs, I would like to mention in passing non-fiction writing in the public
sphere (much of which we could call journalism). A number of professional writers
keep blogs—for example, professional journalists who took up blogging,
such as Andrew Sullivan (independently
hosted blog) or Eric Alterman
(blog on MSNBC), or those who blogged their way into professional etats, such
as Mickey Kaus [I think—he
is on Slate] or Kevin Drum (Washington
Monthly). And there are bloggers who have written mass market books
about blogging, such as Rebecca Blood
or Meg Hourihan. Particulars will have
to wait until the numbers of those who write and those who read blogs stabilize
a bit and they become a normal part of writing.
Works cited
Baker, Nicholson (1997). The size of thoughts. New York: Vintage.
Dawkins, Richard (1976, 1989). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford.
Gibson, William (2003). “Last postcard from Costa Del Blog.” William
Gibson.
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
9/12/2003 Accessed 6/9/04.
----- (2003). “Errata: Signal to Noise.” http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2003_01_01_archive.asp
1/30/03. Accessed 7/1/04.Magg, Jeri. “Are you blogging?” GulfWriters.org.
http://www.gulfwriters.org/casting_call.htm]
Accessed 6/9/04.
Manovich, Lev (2001). The language of new media. Cambridge: MIT..
Monica. “20031126.”. hatstuck snarl. http://hatstuck.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_hatstuck_archive.html
Posted 11/26/03. Accessed 6/9/04.