Re: [-empyre-] Re: docublog

[parrishka <parrishka@sympatico.ca>]

Hi all!

just got wind of this great discussion, via blogs as it turns out- both
brandon's & jill's, so how do you like that.
and that in itself is quite interesting. I consider both jill and brandon to be
colleagues. Brandon I met face to face at a conference on e-poetry in Buffalo
last year. Jill and I have never met face to face, but our mutual blogging &
interlinking has led to other kinds of productive exchanges that are having
offline manifestations.
I've been interested recently in the ways that blogging is breaking down the
internet's fourth wall- the value of the so-called anonymity of the net where
nobody knows you're a dog is something that rarely gets praised in blog culture
anymore. in fact, i find the opposite is true- there's a certain valuing of
"honesty," a contractual understanding of genuine representation that many of
the bloggers I talk to feel is almost sacred. You wanna piss off a blogger?
dissimulate.
course, i'm talking about a certain kind of blogger- specifically the crew that
gathers at South by South West in Austin, Texas, which I went to this year. But
these are the infamous a-listers, the folks who developed blogger and moveable
type, etc.
anyhow, for them, the traffic between online and offline is vital- and in North
America, we're seeing more offline blogging groups meeting in urban centers-
like the Dallas- Ft. Worth bloggers, that numbers upwards of 100 members, and,
in my backyard the Greater Toronto Area Bloggers are gaining in volume, if not
in purpose.


anyhow, re: praystation..

<shameless name dropping>
I talked with Josh Davis at SxSW and he himself doesn't think of praystation as
being a blog, or bloglike. </shameless name dropping>

which begs the question that you all have been asking. what makes a blog a
blog.
Evan Williams of blogger.com is often quoted as saying that blogging is about
frequency, brevity & personality. (not shameless name dropping, you can look
that one up yrselves)

I'm very open to the idea that neither davis nor williams has a large enough
vision for how one might define a blog.
but as web pages that use some form of blogging software become more
ubiqutious, trying define what makes a blog a blog is, i think, going to become
a fruitless, if not impossible, task.
nobody asks what a web page is anymore.
i do think that the idea of the "blog" is going to become somewhat invisible in
this sense.


katherine parrish
http://www.meadow4.com/squish










Adrian Miles wrote:

> At 12:00 +1000 8/6/02, Gregory Little wrote:
> >Yes, it seems odd to me to place such limitations on the blog; requiring it
> >to be fictional, requiring it to be radically new, etc.  I am thinking here
> >of Documentary Film, or even conceptual works of art that document
> >non-fiction, real life events and process (Carolee Schneemann's Blood Work
> >Diary, for example) are clearly art.  Isn't the blog possibly a raw medium
> >in the sense of material, "stuff" that can be (re)formed or
> >(re)contextualized into meaning, either through code or context?
>
> actually the more i've thought about it over a cup of tea the more i
> like the idea of blogs as documentary. documentary is a very rich
> practice that supports everything from the observational bordering on
> surveillance 'objectivity' through to full on essayist approaches. it
> also includes a lot of self awareness about it's own discourse,
> particularly in relation to what it thinks it might be representing.
> documentary certainly strikes me as more self aware than journalism,
> even the current fashion for journalism and 'soft' fictionalisation
> (feature journalism that isn't about politics or politics). or if it
> isn't web documentary (though might bumper sticker that one yet) then
> documentary cinema offers a lot of theoretical insights that are
> relevant to blogging.
>
> and for the artists busy hiding from the academic nature the list has
> leered into. something like praystation would seem to be rather
> bloggish....
>
> 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]
>
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