“Blogging requires an embrace of hazards, a willingness to fall off the trapeze rather than fail to make the leap” ~ Andrew Sullivan
My first blogging experiences happened when I was a high school student back in the late 1990’s. This was before Facebook, MySpace, or LiveJournal, before cellphones became as commonplace as lunch pails, when AOL still ruled the web and high speed broadband was a luxury that most could not afford. I know that I’m making myself sound old and sage-like when it comes to social media, but todays online technologies are deeply steeped in generational rhetorics and, quite frankly, I believe that each of us has used and encountered social media technologies at different points in our lives, with different levels of importance, with different affects, different uses, different commitments, and different concerns.
Part of my short trek into nostalgia-land is to bring attention to some of the similarities and differences between, for example, the earlier days of blogging and blogging today. Early proto-blogging platforms like OpenDiary and LiveJournal paved the way for the commonplace blogging platforms, Blogger and WordPress. Back then blogging was much more personal and akin to maintaining a diary (as many of you may be familiar with from first hand experience). There was a greater degree of anonymity and there was less of a journalistic or magazine readership feel compared to the professional bloggers of today.
I have, as I’m sure you would imagine, grown a great deal from my early teenage years and usage of social media. I dropped the OpenDiary account by the time I graduated high school, and since then had made various half hearted attempts at blogging. I tried blogging/journaling about my personal thoughts and reflections, and quickly deleted the account. I tried blogging about food, literature, or pop culture but felt like I was trying to be too much like a journalist interested in gaining a particular niche readership. All of these attempts never really got past one or two posts.
To a certain extent, my trepidations around blogging also had to do with concerns about my own personal style and tone. I tend to write and speak in a somewhat analytic and academic tone. This might be because I spent the majority of my early twenties in philosophy and rhetoric courses, or it might be because I idolized, worshiped, and modelled myself after Janeane Garofalo in my formative years, either way I’ve worried from time-to-time that my tone can be a bit initially intimidating. In actuality, and this might come as a surprise to acquaintances, I’m a bit of an introvert and am not always as sure of my thoughts, opinions, and writing as I seem.
As a formative information professional, I feel that there is another call for blogging: to maintain professional interests, contacts with colleagues, and provide a central medium or archive of your opinions and well informed critical reflections on issues, topics, and events that are pertinent to your field. I’ve become much more interested in blogging and managing my social media networks toward these professional goals. However, balancing the management of these information productions and flows can be time consuming and difficult along side a full-time course load.
All my wannabe blogger ambitions aside, I do think that the medium of blogging has had a rather interesting relationship to both print media and other forms of social media. Andrew Sullivan‘s 2008 article, Why I Blog, offers some interesting insights on the positionality of bloggers and blogging (not to mention very quotable prose). At one point he discusses the personal origins and nature of blogging:
“What endures is a human brand…It stems, I think, from the conversational style that blogging rewards. What you want in a conversationalist is as much character as authority. And if you think of blogging as more like talk radio or cable news than opinion magazines or daily newspapers, then this personalized emphasis is less surprising. People have a voice for radio and a face for television. For blogging, they have a sensibility.”
I find it intriguing that he relates bloggers more to radio or television personalities rather than op ed writers or journalists. I agree that there is much more of a conversational tone and expectation to blogging, that is somewhat present in radio, but I feel that it is far less present in the more broadcast based medium of television. What I find most intriguing about his description of blogging, is how he relates the tone and style of writing to the medium:
“Reading at a monitor, at a desk, or on an iPhone provokes a querulous, impatient, distracted attitude, a demand for instant, usable information, that is simply not conducive to opening a novel or a favorite magazine on the couch. Reading on paper evokes a more relaxed and meditative response. The message dictates the medium. And each medium has its place—as long as one is not mistaken for the other.”
Each medium has it’s place, and the message dictates the medium. Having been repeatedly reintroduced to Marshall Mcluhan‘s ideas, primarily with The Medium is the Massage, I found this section to be particularly thought provoking. I believe that Sullivan is saying, that even though the medium affects the reader, the nature of the message dictates the appropriate medium. Blogging works best for up-to-date immediate reactions, interpretations, and opinions on an event or article, that can satiate an immediate desire for information. However, you would not look for this sort of content in a novel or academic journal.
However, despite the immediacy with which he describes blogging, I do think that blogging’s sensibility has become remolded or repositioned since the widespread use of Twitter. This blog post by Joe Manna places Twitter among terms such as instant gratification, accountability, and conversation, whereas blogging is described as verbose, fulfilling, longer, and more detailed. I’ve come across this sort of comparison before, and I think it’s important to keep in mind the relationships between various social media, as well as between print and “new media.”
I’d like to end (this rather long post) with a few more quotes on blogging by Sullivan:
“[A blogger] is—more than any writer of the past—a node among other nodes, connected but unfinished without the links and the comments and the track-backs that make the blogosphere, at its best, a conversation, rather than a production.”
“To blog is therefore to let go of your writing in a way, to hold it at arm’s length, open it to scrutiny, allow it to float in the ether for a while, and to let others…pivot you toward relative truth.”
“[A blogger] can provoke discussion or take a position, even passionately, but [she] also must create an atmosphere in which others want to participate.”
