because i'm not an especially original person and am likely to just imitate those who seem to be doing things right, it may very well be time to hoist my scholar flag and get some of my dissertationisms out there, too.
like chuck, i'm very interested in the question of the blog as a representation and product of its author's specific moments in time, though i'm at a loss to respond to that phenomenon as well as he has. the blog's illusion of immediacy, a function of relatively rapid-fire reports on observation and reflection, most certainly affects the status (and perhaps the nature) of knowledge. even without the dynamic quality of blogging communities -- a core of regular posters and readers (or consumers, or users, or organic information processing units) ostensibly cooperate as knowledge makers and interpreters -- the blogging model, in which an author "publishes" regular journal entries (very often meditations on what it means to publish regular journal entries) arrests, codifies, and publicizes an author's thoughts as quickly as she or he can type and click "save." and this definition neglects all sorts of expression -- images, sounds, design, links, titles, blogrolls. clearly a different model than anything that preceded it.
the implications of new media as new epistemology are no doubt broad. among the effects of all this typing, clicking, and posting, there is inescapably thorough work being done on (and by) the already unstable self.
as any reader of augustine's confessions, boswell's life of samuel johnson, douglass' narrative of the life..., or franklin's autobiography knows, auto/biographical writing has never been good at translating experience into text. in fact, that's often hardly the point. memory, imagination, outright dishonesty, exaggeration, romanticization, and wishful thinking all contribute to what james olney calls metaphors of self. and yet literary critics, historians, and casual readers of life-writing continue the search for a more authentic self who precedes and determines the book in hand. thankfully, the study of autobiography has moved in compelling directions during recent decades; following georges gusdorf's revolutionary "conditions and limits of autobiography," critics like olney, paul john eakin, sidonie smith, julia watson, julia swindells, and timothy dow adams have raised the theoretical bar by moving beyond the bad dichotomy of true/false in life-writing.
what happens, though, when the coupling of book and self, in which life-writers produce a substantial and (relatively) static work that somehow correlates with an experienced life (this holds, with obvious variation, in third-person biography, too), becomes a fast moving, editable, temporary, electronic collection of thoughts?
in short (yes, please!) when life-writing goes bloggy, has boswell lost his johnson? while the opportunities to construct selves in the mutable world of blogs would seem to signify a degree of liberation from the stodginess of print auto/biography's generic demands, i wonder about the sometimes cooperative, sometimes competitive moves to write oneself "honestly" and immediately and to write oneself with self-conscious attention to the question of subject-in-the-blog. is there much difference between the blogger who revels in the artifice made available by the form and the "writer" who willfully fictionalizes in what are conventionally nonfiction genres? i have my unsteady and tentative answer. anyone else?
the wheels of the brain, long attached to the tracks of engl 101, are trying to follow the brakeman's sign and get back on the dissertation line.
Posted by dave at July 2, 2003 3:48 PM | TrackBackVery thoughtful post. How would you define the difference between an illusory immediacy and a non-illusory immediacy? Why do you say blogging provides the former?
Posted by: George at July 4, 2003 9:21 AM | Permalink to Commentthanks, george. that's a question i'm having trouble figuring out. i suppose i don't much believe in "non-illusory immediacy," at least when it comes to life-writing (i think much blogging can fairly be called life-writing). and i only use "illusory" as a point on a scale in which varying degrees of mediation come between communicators. near one end, mrs. straw lady has her husband send a text message to his distant cousin and it gets translated from kiswahili to dutch along the way. at the other end, mr. straw man asks mrs. straw lady what she wants for dinner, as cold air rushes between them from out of the open fridge. i think it would be "illusory" for the text-message service to say, "look! it's just like you and your dutch-speaking third cousin are chatting over an open fridge! the globe's reach has been overcome!"
my terms are admittedly muddy (the nature of the beast, i think) but i meant to convey my belief that many of the blogs i visit rely on what feels like a very personable relationship between the blogger and the visitor ("hey, i had this crappy bus ride today. feel free to comment." "anyone care to join in our conversation about ...?" "sorry i didn't post yesterday, but my stupid computer is stupid."). this can (but of course doesn't always) purchase a kind of familiarity that connects author and reader. that's an illusion, i think. or at least its immediacy between self who observes and reflects and visitor who reads and comments is subject to rules (mediation, in my post's terms) that are perhaps just as rigorous as those that dictate the relationship between a print life-writer and her readers.
i imagine there are many good lists of what defines a blog out there (chuck's abstract, linked in the post, for example), but the rules i notice most are 1) a first-person narrative control, based in 2) some kind of approximation of "real" time, 3) linking to those with whom the blogger is having a discussion, 4) a willingness to reflect on the unstable/embryonic/protean/whatever nature of the blog itself, 5) thorough, if not total, acceptance of "blog" as a description, and 6) the formal collection of title, links, entries, comments, and ways to signify time (calendars, dates, monthly archives).
true, or non-illusory, immediacy? i dunno. a face-to-face conversation of course follows rules, but i'm not sure i'd call chatting over a beer a genre. and i do think blogs constitute a genre.
Posted by: dave at July 6, 2003 3:55 PM | Permalink to Comment