Re: [-empyre-] digital writing

[cgi77@aol.com]

Barrie,

What strikes me from your post, comparing blogging to oral 
transmission, is the importance of myth in this context of the virtual. 
Just as myths and spoken poems/stories have only survived because they 
became part of the written tradition, it appears that in the reality of 
writing in the virtual, blogs are one archetype for virtual legend to 
recreate itself, to make shape of the unformed cyber-urban myths of 
societal imagination. One only has to randomly sample the 
superabundance of public blogs to see how blog culture inherently 
creates its own form and categorical structure out of fiction, 
half-truths, and modern fantasy. Jean Baudrillard refers to "...the 
real's hallucinatory resemblance to itself". The mnemonics of Blogging 
could be seen as a self-constructing virtual system that serves the 
same cultural purposes as the historical transmission of myth, the 
virtual real's proclivity to reinvent itself.


-Peter Ciccariello
ARTIST'S BLOG - http://invisiblenotes.blogspot.com/


-----Original Message-----
From: Barrie Collins <barriec@optusnet.com.au>
To: empyre mailing list <empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Sent: Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:53:47 +1000
Subject: [-empyre-] digital writing

  oral tradition has an important social and cultural function, the 
unwritten
word and story passes down through generations, perhaps evolving over 
time,
like a giant, mutating meme. blogs have an evolutionary nature,
conversations evolving over time, branching out. oral tradition 
requires one
story teller to carry on the tradition and pass it on, while blogging 
has
many participating in the story and a widely distributed audience.

participating in a blog is textually flat or cold sort of experience 
with
the audience distributed over a large area and rarely in physical and/or
visual contact, whereas oral tradition requires a face to face audience,
facial expression, gesture, anthropic signals, the exchange is visceral.

what does oral tradition transmit? how does this compare to blogging?

oral tradition is story telling in a cultural setting, it is inclusive 
of
everything in a particular culture. words, sounds and gesture.

blogging seems much more generalised, sometimes focussed, sometimes 
wildly
diverse. it reflects the cultures of its participants and there are many
cultures because it is global. words and type and flickering vdu's.

we are dancing our stories in different ways today.

Barrie


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