First Things First
Some thoughts on joining the blogosphere:
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There are probably more people writing on a regular basis today than at any other time in the last quarter century. What with these new-fangled blogs and all, the primacy of the written word has been reasserted with a vengeance, as the members of the online blog communities produce thousands, if not millions, of words of content on a daily (or more often) basis.
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As readers and pedagogues, how do we respond to blogs? (I suppose that’s one of the questions of ENG 6010.) Do we respond to them as traditional texts or does the very fact of their format demand new modes of discourse with them? Would Pepys keep a blog today, and, if so, would anyone know how to pronounce his name? I’ve often been confused about the use of letters/diaries/journals as literature–does literature mean only works compsed with an eye on some artistic motive or ideal with an aim for posterity, or is its purview broad enough to encompass those works that were composed to aid personal reflection and perhaps were not meant for posterity’s prying eyes?
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Either Ben Franklin or Steve Socrates wrote that "the unexamined life is not worth living." While I hold this to be true, one of my big problems with the idea of blogging is that I don’t believe everyone’s life is worth examining (including my own). Which is to say: I admit an elitist bias that makes it hard for me to read most personal blogs, which (from my admittedly limited experience) seem to be about the comings and goings of one’s friends, the hooking-up status of noisome celebutantes, overly mascaraed emo bands, and other matters which don’t suggest a lasting sense of universality to me. Again, I include myself in this: I can’t suggest any valid reason for someone to read this drivel.
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At some point, New Media will no longer be new. What do we call it then? I suspect that as they become an increasing part of our curricula, the New Media umbrella will splinter into different fields of study, such as sequential narrative art (Will Eisner’s phrase for comics or graphic novels), and what might be christened e-media or e-literature for blogs or hypertext novels and the like.
