A few thoughts on blogging (in an instituational context)
Recently, I’ve been working on pieces of writing that have forced me to cut down my otherwise burgeoning rhetoric to a more manageable density. In order to not lose track of a few interesting ideas about the nature of blogging, I’ve tried phrasing them in simple, short paragraphs. The result is mildly fluffy and philosophical, but I think it will help me remember certain ideas, for example on why blogs are not “online diaries” and what is special about personal publishing. And hey, who knows, maybe you’ll also find this useful. Let me know what you think.
Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not
A piece of software is a usable idea. It can be changed more or less inside the limits of what we can imagine. We tend to imagine things in terms of what we already know: by thinking of pages and books and journals we can think of web pages and e-books and online journals. But the constraints we add are there because they are cognitively useful, not because nature demands them. A blog is not a diary, because a diary is what it is through its physical attributes. Its constraints are real, while in digital reality there are no constraints. Blogs are persistent thoughts.
Now it’s personal
There has never truly been such a thing as personal publishing before. You may have written something by yourself, but you did not publish alone, because publishing depended on physical reality. It was a special ability of institutions and how this ability is used still profoundly shapes our idea of an organization’s identity. That’s why we mistrust bloggers and think of them as extroverts and narcissists. It must be strange to us that individuals can now do what had been the privilege of institutions since the dawn of human civilization. Blogs are personal in power, not content.
Alone on the blank page
Publishing ultimately means defying time and - in digital reality - space. The price for this defiance has always been that we were alone on the page, that while we could cite and quote and refer what we would point to would always be detached, isolated from our brains by time and distance and it would always be a physical object, not a person. The connections between these objects were undocumented and people had to reconstruct them for themselves, starting over every time. Blogs are about making connections where previously none existed.
A scale from communicate to publish
Communicating with another person was previously dependent on sound waves, while publishing was dependent on paper. The first thing allowed us to interact with the people around us here and now, the second allowed us to store our thoughts for posterity. We’ve had technology to extend the here and go beyond the now for a while, but with digital technology communicating and publishing have become the two ends of a single scale. Whether we do one or the other is a choice we make and we can use the same tools for both. Blogs are not conversations. Blogs are anything between a nod or glance and a 10,000-page personal epic.
But it’s public!
Public used to be a well-lit stage that everyone was watching from the dark theater rows. Now the stages are round, with no curtains and no hidden props and they are scattered around the theater. Small groups of people are watching a range of improvisations being performed and occasionally an actor will stop to answer a question from an onlooker or point to another actor. The performance with the largest audience may not be the most interesting one and a lot of great monologues go unnoticed. Public no longer means “everyone”, it means “potentially anyone”.
Behavior beats bottom line
Your blog is you in words and sentences, it is the extension of the communicative self into digital reality - a voice without a half life or limit of reach. Because of this, nothing is ever final in the same way that words anchored to a physical object are. Anything that is said can and will provoke a linked response at some point in time, either from yourself or from someone else. A reader from outside your organization will intently watch this interaction as it unfolds and he will deduct who you are from how you communicate. Interact skillfully and he will note it positively, flout the rules of communicative fairness and transparency and he will perceive you as arrogant, insecure and out of touch. Whatever you do stays on record forever and the record never stops growing. The qualities you demonstrate in interaction beat what you accomplish on your own, because there’s always someone watching.
(On Sep 5th, 2007 at 5:25 pm)
Thank you for an excellent summary of what distinguishes the blog from other forms of publication. Coming from an academic environment that privileges the mechanical, physical page, and that views electronic innovations in publishing with principled distrust, I have been having a difficult time trying to explain (and, often, justify) my advocacy of blogging to my colleagues. I’m sending them all a link to this article.
(On Sep 5th, 2007 at 11:04 pm)
Glad that you liked it and hopefully they will, too.