Funferal

Back online – MCLLM 1: weblog as literature

You don’t realise how dependent on your internet connection you are until you have to go off-line for a prolonged period of time. And by prolonged I mean just over 50 hours. Thankfully, it was all in a good cause – I headed up to the wilds of De Kalb – home of cornfields and Cindy Crawford, as the publicity goes – to attend the Midwest Conference on Language, Literature and Media. Meg Hourihan was giving a keynote presentation (The Weblog Revolution: how technology and amateurs are changing the way we communicate). [Update: I have corrected the link, which points to the powerpoint version – I will link to the html when available]
The talk was invigorating, and gave some interesting insights into the likely direction of the Lafayette Project. The first good sign was when Meg defined blogs as:

Web page with small chunks of hypertext

date-stamped

ordered reverse-chronologically

newest information at the top of the page

I know it’s a small thing, but I’ve become quite annoyed with the myriad definitions I’ve seen in the last while, which talk of blogs being chronologically ordered. There are some, of course (though I haven’t seen one in a while), but the convention is for a reverse ordering. Obviously, those writing are aware of this, so it’s generally just sloppy thinking. The temptation, then, is to wonder where else sloppy thought might be in evidence. Here, the first hurdle, then, had been passed.
Meg described blogs as a web native format – one which liberates the writer (and reader) from the page paradigm, which was inherited from previous technologies. This may, at first, appear trivial, but it touches on something that had come up at a previous session that Meg had sat in on. There, the discussion of celebrity and weblogs had segued into a discussion of the form, and one participant questioned whether the weblog – given the ease with which posts could be immediately composed – removed the careful thought and editing that had existed, they claimed in previous formats such as diaries and autobiographies. This being so, they claimed, weblogs could not lay claim to the mantle of ‘literature’ as these previous formats could. Meg had, unsurprisingly, bristled at the deprecation, and explained how editing still did, and could, occur (which led of course to a general discussion on revision, authenticity and permanence).
It seems to me though, that the issue over the claim to ‘literature’ status is not fundamentally about editing – or rather that the strongest argument is one which pre-empts this side-issue. In claiming ‘literature’ status for diaries as a genre, while denying it to weblogs, we cannot be talking of ‘quality’, but merely of recognising a distinct literary genre. Within any individual genre there are conventions and expectations, and it is against these that a particular piece of work must be judged. Wordsworth described poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”, and insofar as this is an accurate description of poetry we can measure the quality of a poem – as a piece of literature within it’s genre – against this rubric. However (and leaving aside the issue of whether this is either an accurate or sufficient definition), the definition is totally inadequate for, for example, the novel. A novel has it’s own rules and expectations, which would in turn not be met bby much of what we understand as good poetry.
Similarly, weblogs, as a genre, are held to qualitatively different standards. While it is possible for a particular entry to be poor – and the short editing process may sometimes play a part in this – the quality of a blog post lies to a large extent in it’s place in what Meg calls a ‘distributed conversation’. If a poem is judged by how it fits into the greater world of poetry, a blog must also – and more overtly – be part of it’s cultural milieu. Links to outside documents are only the most obvious parts of this process. The post must be consistent with what Habermas calls the ‘warrant’ issued by the author in previous posts on the blog. Of relevance to the question of editing, the post must appear in the conversation in a timely fashion – prolonged editing, by ignoring this requirement, would negate the value of the post as a weblog post.
An individual post can, therefore, be seen as a single speech act, which can only be understood in the context of a greater conversation. If this was true for previous media, the significance for web native formats is both the formalisation of this process, and the removal of many of the linear constraints. There is a surface-level irony in the time-stamp based, reverse-chronological order of weblogs. However, I believe that this is deceptive, and that an individual blog is best regarded as an individual narrative threading it’s way through the greater topological framework of the blogosphere, the web, and the outside world. Rather than abandoning the strengths of hypertext, weblogs merely allow the return of a narrative voice, through which one can start to make sense of the mess of documents that make up the web.
One final thought, before I move to other questions. In pushing the reader to continually make decisions regarding whether or not to follow this link or that, the weblog forces an active participation, the result of which is a narrative path for the reader which can differ drastically for each person. Again, this is not in itself unusual, but the overt nature of the process is.
I’ll be back with more thoughts later (need to grab a few hours rest first)…