Blogging Beyond the Boundaries

By Ian, on November 28th, 2006

The online academic journal Reconstruction has a special issue devoted to blogs and blogging. It includes a paper from one of my favourite Aca/Fans, Danah Boyd, entitled ‘A Blogger’s Blog: Exploring the Definition of a Medium’.

What follows is a summary/simplification with a tiny pinch of comment.

She’s talking about the difficulties involved in defining the medium, not simply because there are many different types of blog, but because “blogging has blurred the lines between orality and literacy, corporeality and spatiality, public and private”.

What does that mean? Well, there are problems with most definitions of blogs. Typically, these involve comparisons to other forms, such as a diary, journal, scrapbook, or notebook. According to the interviews Boyd has carried out with bloggers, that doesn’t quite tally with practitioners’ own understanding of what they are doing and producing. One interviewee says “blogging is what we do when we say, “We’re blogging.” And not worried much about what’s a blog, and what’s a journal, and what’s a whatever.”

Bloggers identify strongly with their blogs, Boyd says, “seeing it as them”. We view a visit to our page as equivalent to meeting us. Consider the time and effort put into blog design and blog jewellery; as much effort, perhaps, as we might put into our personal appearance in preparation for a meeting. Blogs are more than a place or a platform, “the blog becomes both the digital body as well as the medium through which bloggers express themselves”. You might think about the way we hyperlink to other blogs — Rohan Jayasekera — as though it’s him.

The blurring of orality and literacy comes through the way in which bloggers think about their practice as akin to speech. Think about the number of times you’ve heard (read) the word conversation in association with blogging, or the idea that it allows companies to listen. When people refer to other blog posts they tend to write “X says that …” I’d also suggest that this is to do with the casual style of writing associated with blogs, “come-as-you-are conversations” in Dave Winer’s words. The language used by bloggers is closer to speech than most other forms of writing. One interviewee, Jennifer, says:

You’re basically standing on a soapbox and reading something out loud only with a blog it feels like there’s a big community square and everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height and everyone’s reading at the same time. So it’s a matter of people going and listening to one and oh, I don’t like what you’re saying and blogging with someone else and listening to what they’re saying until you happen to find someone who is saying something interesting or you happen to know where your friend is on his soapbox saying something.

Because people identify so strongly with their blogs, viewing them as a facet of their own personality, or their digital face, there’s a tension when people come and visit. Your blog is a public space, your stage, but it’s also private in some other senses. It’s your space. I’ve read people likening their blog as inviting people into their house. I’ve also been told that some of the attraction of blogs is a natural voyeurism: peeking through the gap in the curtains into someone else’s house.

That means comments, especially negative comments, can make bloggers feel awkward. Boyd likens it to someone writing graffiti on your digital body. You might prefer the idea of someone wandering into your living room leaving dirty footprints on the carpet:

Three of my subjects who have small audiences expressed frustration over negotiating unwanted readers and struggled with how to exclude readers who kept returning even after explicit requests to go away. Given a corporeal nature in blogs, unwanted audience presence gives people a sense of being invaded.

You might have the feeling that this is all a bit… well… academic. But there is also a political element to these discussions. Definitions of blogs seek to exercise power over them. This is especially the case when mainstream media talks about ‘online diaries’ or ‘web scrapbooks’. It’s implicitly saying not proper writing by proper writers. Boyd points to an article in the New York Times headlined Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps and a paper called Blogging as Social Activity, or, Would You Let 900 Million People Read Your Diary? The first suggests bloggers and blogs are trivial and amateur; the second suggests they’re weird.

Blogs are, to use that tired old phrase literally, New Media. Not quite diaries; not quite conversations, nor notebooks, nor scrapbooks, nor magazines. But because “everyone’s got a soapbox and they’re about the same height”, they’re enormously powerful and compelling.