Benjamin Geer on Wed, 15 Aug 2007 14:17:41 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> The banality of blogging |
2007/8/13, Kimberly De Vries <cuuixsilver@gmail.com>: > Blogs do offer some terrific opportunities for study and theorizing, and of > course you are right Eduardo, that they differ enormously from pens in their > ability to reach vast numbers as easily as just a few. So did the printing press when it was invented. But as far as I know, nobody has suggested that texts published using printing presses are inherently... anything. The first books printed were Bibles, not because printing presses inherently lend themselves to printing Bibles above all else, but because that was what a lot of people wanted to read. Similarly, if there are a lot of banal texts published on blogs, it's not because there's some necessary connection between blogs and banality, but because a lot of people want to publish and read those sorts of texts nowadays. Banal public self-revelation is a vast social phenomenon, encompassing huge sections of the publishing industry and the media, and banal blogs are just one small part of it. At the same time, though, great texts are still being published, and some of them are being published on blogs. > A fairly recent preliminary survey by the Pew Internet and American Life > project confirms that most blogging is personal What does this really tell us? I suspect most email is probably personal, too, but is that interesting in itself? What's more interesting to me is that here we are on nettime, having a very unusual sort of discussion about media, culture and politics, and email made it possible. Similarly, I think it's interesting that a French university professor, specialised in Arab literature, is using a blog to publish some of the fruits of his research on media and publishing in the Arab world: http://culturepolitiquearabe.blogspot.com/ Or that an anonymous Egyptian is using a blog to publish analyses (in English) of developments in Egyptian politics and literature, reflecting an apparently vast network of contacts among the political and literary elites: http://baheyya.blogspot.com/ Or that blogger, political activist and free software advocate Alaa Seif (http://manalaa.net) uses his blog to publish news, analyses and opinions on politics and technology in Egypt, not in the literary Arabic of newspapers (a language few Egyptians feel at ease in), but in Egyptian dialect, in an uninhibited, often hilarious style that I suspect many readers must find liberating. And that when he was arrested last year, his friends launched an international campaign to get him released... using a blog (http://freealaa.blogspot.com/). Email made nettime possible, but it didn't make it inevitable. There are also mailing lists where people discuss banal personal experiences. Social factors, not technological ones, make the difference. Nettime is above all a certain kind of social environment, and that (not the technology used) is what explains the presence of certain kinds of texts here. So to study blogs, I think you'd have to study the ways they're used socially, looking at, for example, networks of links between blogs to identify communities of writers. Of course, the social phenomenon of linking is nothing new; in book publishing, it's called citation. Ben # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@kein.org and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org