Felix Stalder on Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:48:53 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> The banality of blogging |
Jon Lebkowsky wrote: > This is an odd conversation that confuses form and content. "Blog" is > form, just as "book" is form. You can't make a general statement about > the content or quality of "all" books; there's a huge diversity. What > you can say most clearly is that books are generally a collection of > printed pages bound and organized in a particular bookish way. > > Same for blogs. What I find true of blogs is that they're generally > but not always short form series of posts published in reverse > chronological order, sometimes with comments, usually with permalinks > to individual posts, etc. I totally agree. Mixing up the analysis of the form with the analysis of the content of media is very difficult. Now, you don't have to go as far as McLuhan and say that only formal aspects matter (medium is the message, gutenberg galaxy, etc etc). But, still, media as enviroment (form) and media as channel (content) demand very different styles of analysis, leading to different results. Each can be valid, depending what you want to find out. Yet in both cases, it helps to be specific. If you speak about form (ie. blogs in general), it helps to define the formal aspects of what consitutes a blog and then think about the consequences of just these aspects. If you speak about the content (ie. some particular blogs), it helps to be specific about which blogs you speak (those of american teenagers, anglo-saxon economic professors, Iranian civil rights activists, whatever). Otherwise, it's all to easy to fall into the trap of taking one's personal experience as a general one, or of making grand generalization that don't relate to anything. Benjamin Geer wrote: > 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. This is wrong. Twice. There are a lot of things that are inherent to texts published using printing presses: they are published as stable, identitical copies, written by an identifiable author (who may hide in particular instances, but that there is a neeed to hide is telling). They are cheap, they are plentyful, and they are written and read alone, in silence. All of this has deep consequences, as any scholar of printing can tell you. Gutenberg printed the bible not as a result of an analysis of the book market or the preferences of the reading public (none of these existed at the time). Rather, how else could he show the worthiness of his new invention if not through the promotion of god's word? While the technology of Gutenberg was distinctly modern, as an individual, he was medival. This is often the case. Technologies are more advanced than their . users Perhaps this is also the case with blogging . Felix --- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------------- out now: *|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 ----- End forwarded message ----- # 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