Chekhov's Mistress

Two Perspectives on Blogging

by Bud Parr

Blogs, blogs everywhere. Most people haven’t heard of them, but for those that have they remain an enigma, even for those of us deeply involved. I bring this up after seeing two perspectives on blogging; one from a blogger and one from a writer who has had some involvement in blogs.

David Auerbach, who, if you know his site Waggish, only writes when he has something to say, explores the phenomenon in a piece called “Thoughts on Genre: Blogs and Genre.” David explores the “brutally short horizon for content” and the concept of the “gestalt” in blogging [David, I apologize for chopping up your fine essay]. He says:


There is much less of a focus on discrete work in blogs than there is in most other media. Individual posts may be called out for brief (or occasionally permanent) fame, but in the stream of work being published by an individual, quickly fading into the horizon, blogs are identified by gestalt characteristics rather than by discrete posts. To draw the literary analogy, bloggers are much more Balzac than Joyce.


Carrying that to its conclusion, David says:


The aspects of instant feedback and increased collaboration also dilute the notion of authorship. People aren’t paying attention to individual works, and many blogs have multiple authors. The ability to distinguish an exceptional work does not exist…


And raises another interesting point:


But, you say, the authors of these blogs are distinct and discrete. Even ignoring the collaborative aspect of blogs, I don’t think this quite holds true. Blogs are not content-focused, in that the content rolls by too quickly to be lasting. (Yes, they provide content, but when it’s so subject to being missed or disorganized, the structural integrity of the content is not the focus.) But nor are they personality-focused. If Josh Marshall started writing exclusively about Andrei Tarkovsky tomorrow, he would lose much of his audience…


Thus concluding that:


Blogs, then, are topic-focused. (And by topic I effectively mean the definable gestalt of the blog.) Individual content matters less in a blog than sticking to a consistent topic over time.


And:


This produces two diverging effects: either people get lost in the mass of repetitive, homogenous content and process what they happen to run into, or they abstract quite heavily to synthesize large amounts of data into a graspable gestalt. Sort of like reading Balzac.


I think David has begun to capture an idea I’ve grappled with for a while now (and please read the essay for the appropriate context of what I’ve reprinted here). What makes what you write have anything more than passing meaning in a vast sea of blogs? Does it have any meaning if only, say, ten people read it, or twenty or a hundred? Does it have meaning if someone else links to it or comments on it?


I don’t really mean “why blog” for there are many reasons to do so that are well catalogued here and elsewhere. I’m talking about the value of content or any individual post and particularly longer posts. Is value defined by the number of readers? Not necessarily. As David points out, those with short, frequent posts are the most popular, whereas those who write long, infrequent essays see less traffic. Pointing to an article in the Guardian may be more valuable (spreading the word) than pointing to an essay written by some unaffiliated person with no professional right to credibility, but that’s not my own point of view. The idea of The Long Tail, a term that essentially means statistically insignificant, might be appropriate in capturing all this writing, but identifying that it exists doesn’t answer the question why.


First, there really are two types of blogs: those that are personality driven (still, I think defined as a topic in David’s terminology) and those that are more topic driven in the sense that I call this site a “litblog,” meaning I write mostly about books. Even though my personality is certainly an unmistakable part of the site, that’s not what I write about. There is the divergence.


Whether or not it is a personality you are writing about (yours) or a topic, your personality is what makes you part of the conversation. That, I suppose is why so many people hang on to having their own blog as opposed to being part of collaborative blogs. Even members of collaborative sites often retain their own blog as either a primary or adjunct to the group.


In my aggregator I have 3095 unread blog entries. I’m not sure how many subscriptions I have, but that number is easily around several hundred, with litblogs taking up maybe a third or slightly more. I tend to focus on the handful of sites that I know (the personality) well and sift through the remaining entries when time permits (and Time rarely permits anything – he’s a bastard really). In a way, reading blogs, even though I have myriad to choose from and I’m always seeking out more, have become the same thing as reading, for example, Thomas Friedman’s op-ed in the NY Times.


Some blogs I read only because they are part of the gang, some I read because I want to know what they have to say, some to find an interesting article here or there that I would otherwise miss, but as a whole (as a whole), I have my own personal op-ed cabal that in a way, I created. Still, that doesn’t really address the value of “discrete” content that I am questioning. From my perspective, when I write, I do so because it forces me to think and I enjoy that. But my ego wants my writing to be read and wants my writing to have value beyond the gratification of looking smart for a few minutes (at the great risk of looking ignorant too).


Tom Dolby, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle (Writers make good bloggers, but does blogging affect good writing? 11-July-05*), characterizes blog posts as “narcissistic ramblings.” Indeed, that may be true, but by the end of the article I questioned whether or not Mr. Dolby has spent much time reading the likes of Waggish and the substrata of blogs whose authors write about books and reading and writers – the true long-tail of on-line writing. He writes:


The novelist Jennifer Weiner, for example, has an entertaining blog (jenniferweiner.blogspot.com) in which she fills her readers in on everything from the novels she’s working on to the television shows she watches to what her toddler ate for lunch. Like Weiner, I am also a devotee of popular culture. I have all sorts of comical daily experiences and observations, and I surf other blogs and have opinions about them as much as any writer does.


Because I don’t have a regular column anywhere, and not every reflection about life as Tom Dolby fits into the novel I’m currently writing, often these experiences sit dormant in my journal or in some file on my computer. If I had a blog, they could be out there in the world. They could sing! I could write about my wonderfully eccentric family; I could let my readers know about my recent breakup and re-entry on the dating scene. I could discuss books I’ve enjoyed and articles I’ve read. In my most egotistical moments, I imagine that since it’s all fascinating to me, it would be of interest to my readers as well. That is, of course, the essence of a personal blog: “I am, therefore I blog.”


This misses the point so widely that it’s upsetting. In his defense, he distinguishes the “personal blog” as his topic, if only in passing, but that distinction isn’t too meaningful since most every blog is personal. I agree with him in a sense: To solely write about your own daily life holds little value, as entertaining as some might find it. However, I enjoy when a blogger who normally writes about books drops in personal notes about themselves or their lives, or takes the time to respond to one of the “memes” that circulates around the blogosphere. But to put blogging solely in that frame does it a great disservice.


Dolby poses the question:


Imagine, for a moment, if blogs were not a recent phenomenon: Would Philip Roth have blogged about his divorces? Would J.D. Salinger have posted entries about his reluctance to publish again?


But I ask how amazing it would be if Philip Roth or J.D. Salinger wrote about literature as Scott Esposito or Robert Gray do (to name but two)? We could judge their words based upon their words and not filtered through the lens of a reporter or editorial constraints. I would challenge the likes of Mr. Dolby to blog; to blog about books and writing and not about his “comical daily experiences” that frankly are best left to high-schoolers. Ron Silliman is an established poet who has a blog that is informed and opinionated and I love knowing that someone cares enough about poetry to spend a lot of time writing about it for no good reason.


The true value of any one blog post may be ephemeral at best, but I do think (obviously) that there is value in the “gestalt.” I don’t necessarily agree with what I believe is David’s view that content just becomes a homogenous blur, even if on a daily basis it does get lost a bit. It’s more a part of a conversation, a word I’ve probably used too much in this context. The conversation analogy may be apt though if we admit to ourselves that in most conversations we are usually just waiting to get our word in. So I guess through comparing David and Tom’s different perspectives, I leave myself with one more question. Is the value of blogs in the writing or reading?


*link via TEV


Read widely, think well, and write often

posted July 13, 2005

comments

Judicious and thoughtful, and a great question opened up for us there. The short answer is surely that there is much value in the writing, reading and conversing. Do we need to choose between these pleasures if we’re fortunate enough to be able to play with a bit of code and string a few words together? Especially when all those articles ( and not a few texts) are sitting a click away, waiting for us to share them around.

    – genevieve (07/19  at  09:03 AM)


Whoops, nearly forgot - hope all the Parrs have a lovely holiday.

    – genevieve (07/19  at  09:05 AM)


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