PS As Hsien points out in comments, the NYRB link was broken. The irony. It works now.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
On Blogging
Hmmm, here is a long article about blogging by Sarah Boxer in the New York Review of Books. It's curious piece which is both right and wrong in roughly equal proportions. There are two (related) things Boxer is right about - what used to be called hypertext and the in media res style of most blogs. The hypertext point is crucial. Nowadays, when writing anything other than my blog, I find myself itching to insert a link. Links save me the labour of lining 'my phrases with the costly stuff of explanation' (Ashbery) or they allow me to add an, as it were, fifth dimension to the prose. There's something, technically speaking, poetic about links. Of course, the lure of links tend to make posts rather elliptical and this leads to Boxer's in media res point. Blogs usually assume you understand their language and context, so posts fling you into the action without pausing to explain. (My 'Hmmm' at the beginning of this post is a good example.) As Boxer puts it, 'Bloggers breeze through places, people, texts and blogs that you might or might not know without providing any helpful identification.' This is largely correct but it misses the point. It's not just blogs that do that. When I interviewed Steven Spielberg about Minority Report, I pointed out that he expected his audiences to take in a hell of a lot of information in the first five minutes. He said that's the way people were these days, they had been, so to speak, tuned to respond very rapidly to visual and auditory cues. This affects everything. TV ads, novels and films are now expected to dump you, without explanation, in media res. Shawn Ryan is the master of this - see what I mean in his superb cop show The Shield. The unexplained dialogue, location, action or set-up are now just the way we do things. Blogs didn't invent this, they simply adopted it. Beyond that, Boxer's generalisations about blogs are dull and the article descends into nothing more than mildly interesting observations. The mistake, I suppose, is her attempt to see blogs as a distinct phenomenon rather than one further manifestation of the world as it now is. Technology does not solve problems, it invents needs. Speed is the need invented by hyper-connectivity, the speed of the link and the unexplained. Blog are, before they are anything else, fast.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
I have thought of the links much as footnotes or endnotes and a reading list, in that the text of the post should hold intact without them. But with them a clearer and deeper understanding is achieved. Sometimes.
ReplyDeleteBrian, Your link to the Boxer piece is broken. Here's the working link:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/21013
Eek! I'm sorry I misspelled your name.
ReplyDeleteLinks also allow readers to digress and disappear, something footnotes on a printed page rarely do. I imagine that can be threatening to many writers (and publishers).
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure Boxer is largely correct about that point, however, Bryan. It seems to me most provide links to those "places, people, texts and blogs" that she claims they breeze through without identifying. The blogger knows that those who don't recognize the reference can instantly find the information, either through a link, google or Wikipedia. (The readers are connected to the internet or they wouldn't be reading the blog.) It seems to me the link is an implicit identification, the luxury of which is denied to someone writing for a traditional newspaper or magazine, whose identifications are invariably explicit.
Yes, blogs are fast. Not necessarily better, mind you. Just different. And faster.
It seemed like a nice intro to blogs for people who don't know them and a nice promo for her book! Has anyone got it on-line somewhere yet?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHmmn, there is some danger of the technology overwhelming the whole shebang, until it becomes just another trip, a mindless trip. Using Firefox extensions, of which there are hundreds, I can right-click my mouse on any word or phrase for an automatic check on reference sites from Wikipedia to the Urban Dictionary or IMDb, or check it out on Google Maps, or save it as a snippet to an automatically created home wiki, a kind of blog of my blog reading. It's easy to imagine the same extending to software that will analyse a piece and then play the most appropriate music from your on-disk collection or take you to a matching video on YouTube or, worse, to a shopping site. Indeed, such software and perhaps much more may already exist. Imagine that it comes preloaded and embedded in your Windows browser ...
ReplyDeleteThe only problem with this is that the process has taken over, leaving out thought, attention, analysis and that small lump of grey matter between our ears. And there's the commercial angle, too, particularly on the big American blogs: would these guys be trying to say that about this if they weren't trying to sell something?
On the whole I'm wary of blogs. I can see they have a lot going for them, but they also have downsides. And I wonder how fruitful and satisfying they really are for the blogger. If blogs are to last, then as a form they'll need to satisfy something deep within ourselves, for both writer and reader. And if not, well, we might, shock horror, have to return to talking to people or reading whole books.
Not a bad article but rather superficial. i think the main thing about blogging is the response of one's readers. Everything i write on my blog is conditioned by the knowledge that i have readers, about 20 of whom i know in some way (from their comments or their own blogs), and some of whom hate my guts.
ReplyDeleteIt took some effort to mentally & emotionally reposition myself so i can write without giving a damn what people think, except for taking a certain malign relish in offending the pompously unironic. i would never be published in a newspaper or book, but even if i were i'd not have that sense of warlike glee when i log on in the morning to see if i've got any abusive comments from angry prudes, feminists, Jesuit-hunters, or Republicans. It's the instantaneous nature of the responses - sometimes 5 minutes after posting - and that anyone with internet access can lay into you. Very different (i imagine) from publishing an article in the Guardian and getting an angry counter-article in some other newspaper a few days later, by another journalist. Blogging is more like standing by the side of the road talking to yourself: sometimes people stop and listen, and sometimes they spit on your face. That gives a very different feel to only being open to attacks from other journalists, i'd have thought.
"Technology does not solve problems, it invents needs."
ReplyDeleteHow did we manage before we had... the list is endless. But can technology continue to invent needs for ever? Surely, our capacity for 'the all-new' cannot be infinite? If it is, I dread to think what we will find indispensable in another 100 years or so, particularly in the field of entertainment (beyond that is way over the horizon in my head). Technology kind of scares me in this regard. The deeper it delves into the human psyche in its quest for novelty, the more likely it will invent a need that really it shouldn't. If you know what I mean. Sorry for the digression.
When I was first thrown in at the deep end of this Blog, I made the bold experiment (hem hem) of blogging without links - okay so this was occasioned by my lack of techie knowhow and the primitive technology I was, and often still am, working with. Anyway it didn't go down well - I seem to remember a blog without links being likened to an egg without salt and suchlike, and I was soon drawn in to linking (after a fashion). I can see the sense in it too - blogging wighout links is missing a dimension, and a pathway out of the bloggers' delusions into someting resembling an outside reality. The downside is that this tethering in the 'real' prevents the creation of a complete counterfactual world, as in, for example, Auberon Waugh's Diaries or Michael Wharton's Peter Simple - but maybe that is not a blog's job. By the way, call me a pedant, but when I was a lad, the phrase was In medias res...
ReplyDeleteNige, you can get around the real world problem by only linking to other spoof sites or just lunatic ones. E.g., "a Jesuit priest gave the Theory of Relativity to Einstein, link here [i can't do links so imagine there's one], research it, it's all true." And you link to a lunatic, but hey, you linked somewhere.
ReplyDelete