Mortensen's Personal Publication and Public Attention raises some interesting questions about how blogging is/may be perceived by both those within academic circles and those with more "sensuous," unsophisticated tastes. Mortensen adds, "In order for an object to be worthy of study, it needs to flatter a cultured taste, and not a barbaric one." But I'm not sure I understand exactly what she means by this.
As blogs are often categorized by form, this week's readings suggest that content may be the most important element that would help us define what a blog is/does. Therefore, it is unfair to make sweeping generalizations about the blog as a tool of high or low culture without considering the content/genre of X blog. Using Moveable Type as a "measuring stick for the sophisticated blog" seems to encourage a sort of technological one-upmanship that indicates more about one's knowledge of programming than their ability to contribute to serious academic discourse. I seem to recall one of this week's readings mentioning that Blogger may have opened the floodgates to those who just want to, say, blog about their cat. But it also allows more serious academics who don't have the time/inclination to learn HTML to participate in this form of written communication.
In Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog, Miller and Shepherd write, "Perhaps the blog is already evolving into multiple genres, meeting different exigences for different rhetors--journalists, teenagers, the high-tech community, etc." Shouldn't the academic world judge blogs based on content rather than form? After all, pulp fiction and dime novels are structurally the same as canonical literature. . .
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I was also struck by that line in Miller and Sheperd's piece; heck, even leaving comics out most books look the same yet are classed as wildly different genres. Just as genres of web sites themselves diversified as fast as people learned to interact with the technology, genres of blogs will branch out and careen onto unforseen paths. I suppose it's the "perhaps" at the beginning of the sentence that irks me. The collective pedagogical desire for things to be static so they can be studied irritates me sometimes.
How about intent? Perhaps more than anything, the user's purpose or intent would be a fruitful way to categorize, since we must categorize, blogs. Towards the end of the article (Personal Publication and Public Attention), Mortensen alludes to the fact that culturally critical approaches "underline the importance of the context within which a medium is used, by whom and to what purpose." Or does my suggestion indicate that I have been "trained to colonize," only from a more politically correct angle?
I agree that it should be content rather than form that is judged. This is true in all forms of printed material. Elizabeth mentions comics and in today's world of graphic novels even the "comic book" has taken on a different form and higher purpose than just a brief humorous 4-5 window format. People write blogs for many different purposes and I don't think most people are doing it for the benefit of society or to take a place in public policy or shaping the future. I think most people are writing blogs based on their interest in communicating ideas with other people. This can be because they want to communicate or debate with others or to provide their viewpoint as an expert on a subject. Some blogs may survive as critically important pieces of literature, but I feel these are definitely a very small percentage of the huge numbers of blogs being written.
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