[-empyre-] Re: academic blogging

[Adrian Miles <adrian.miles@uib.no>]

At 12:00 +1000 9/6/02, saul wrote:
> Brando first the discourse shaped by its history tries to adapt the technology
> to itself -- then the technology goes to work reshaping the discourse -- the
> nets information glut which was first understood to be a resource -- the world
> at your fingertips -- has now begun to infect not only academic 
> discourse but to
> actually blur the nature of academic disciplines -- in part because the means
> accomplish more than the limited goals originally set for them --  yet
> ultimately if the technology does not serve the discourse it soon comes to be
> abandoned -- we can also talk of transitional forms - which blogging would
> appear to me to be -- i.e.. it is something that is formally possible and may
> produce interesting possibilities which will eventually lead to it a 
> abandonment

not sure if i follow saul, but wearing my official 'defender of the 
blog' power ring i'd wonder about how all academic discourse has 
mutated subject to various technological imperatives. i'd also wonder 
about the hypostatisation of the essay form in humanities writing as 
the privileged mode of academic expression, a form that is minor in 
the history of knowledge and certainly within the university. 
(accountants, business students, and scientists, engineers, 
biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists don't write essays. 
it's a minor genre.)

anyway, aside from that (remember the ring) i'd have said that all 
those homepages that us academics put up all those years ago, and 
gently tended, and those essays of our own that we may or may not 
have included, and our cvs, and the rest of the flotsam, that that 
was the transitional form. blogs might evolve into something else (i 
think there will be something else) but i also think blogs or 
bloqesque literacy is here to stay.

how long? who knows. books have been around for 550 years, if an 
internet year = 7 years then they'd need to be around for 80 odd 
years to have the same cultural capital. but that's cheating isn't 
it? :-) since that's gutenberg's bible which is hardly books for the 
masses. for that you probably ought to look to penguin and the 
paperbook which first appeared in 1935, now that's only 65 odd years 
which in internet years would need to be 11 years. they've been 
around for what, 2 or is it 3 years? and i do think there will be 
blog like things in 2009. certainly things that will strongly bear 
their blog parentage (atavistic blogs?).

and that is of course assuming that 11 years of blogging = 70 years 
of paperback publishing which also assumes that forms of knowledge 
expression ought to retain some permanence of form.

(you'll have to excuse the tone of the email, it's queens birthday 
holiday here in melbourne. no, it ain't her birthday. no, some of us 
don't think she's really our queen. it leads to proselytising.)

cheers
adrian miles
--
   
+  lecturer in new media and cinema studies 
[http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/vlog]
+  interactive desktop video developer  [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/vog/]
+  hypertext rmit [http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au]
+ InterMedia:UiB. university of bergen [http://www.intermedia.uib.no]