[-empyre-] An "other" view of writing

[Anna Munster]

Hi Yvonne,
thanks for your post. You are right to point out that the initial attraction of wiki's was the 'real time' collaborative edit function and you also stated that:

<Both formats rely on the same technology.>

That's possibly true as well but that's also like saying everything on the web used to rely on HTML. That doesn't mean we had a homogeneous web in terms of its architecture or 'technics'. I use the word technics here as opposed to 'technology' because I am not so much interested in the wiki or blog software per se. Rather I am interested in the ways in which that software 'shapes' forms of culture because the culture deploys it 'prosthetically'. Please note I am scare-quoting these words because in the history of media studies they  take on a deterministic flavour, which isn't what I want to invoke. Instead I see technics as the ongoing interrelations between cultures and technologies (shaping and prostheses are processual rather than pre-formed actions and things), out of which modes of doing media arise. So, the interrelation between the architecture of wiki's (which is sprawling at the back end of things), their uptake by, initially small collaborative project-based groups and collectives, their 'capture' by an encyclopaedic urge (Wikipedia), their sharing of a resource by a mass heterogenous user base consisting of a meshwork of open and closed systems and practices (again Wikipedia/media)....this constitutes the (ongoing) technics of wikis. 

Blogs, on the other hand, have a very different technics and, especially, their uptake due to the 'templatization' of the web under web 2.0, would have to be one of their most salient aspects. Olia Lialina's work on this is very good (http://www.contemporary-home-computing.org/vernacular-web-2/), as is Geert Lovink's book Zero Comments.

Insofar as your comment goes:

< It's an industry.>

I couldn't agree more!!

best Anna