Today’s a combination research/teaching prep day. I’m wrestling with some issues of language, history, and genre, so consider this entry an example of that wrestling. I hadn’t really intended my original entry on blogging awards to spark such conversation; it was really just an offhand observation. But now I think it might help me think through some other issues.

Questions to consider:

• What makes a form of communication truly new?
• What makes a form of communication truly unique?

My stock answer is that no form of communication is ever truly new or truly unique. New forms tend to be conceived at first in terms of the old, as I’ve written before. And old forms are reconceived in the face of the new. Still, for whatever reason, I find myself arguing that we should reserve for blogging some unique features. In response to my blogging awards entry, Matt writes that he doesn’t see my criterion of “the textual intervention of others” as key to the definition of blogging.

So what caused me to make that assertion? Well, when a bunch of us academic bloggers were asked about famous bloggers, like Wonkette, I responded, “Oh, that’s not really blogging.” And I still believe that. It’s just the same old content you might find in, say, “The Reliable Source” in the Washington Post, but it’s updated more frequently. If Wonkette is a blog, then when I pick up my phone and say “Breaker 1 9, I got a smokey on my tail” I’m using a CB Radio. If you channel old media content through a new media channel, is it new media? I say no. You might, however, think I’m wrong in characterizing Wonkette’s content as old media.

In his comment, Matt writes,

To me, blogging is much more about the creation of a persona; all bloggers do this to an extent, even when they blog under a true name (like I do). The persona is created in all kinds of mundane ways I suspect we’d agree on–style and tone, subject matter, decisions about what to include or not to include, etc.

Fair enough, but there are many forms of writing through which a persona is created by these techniques: diaries, newspaper columns, first person fiction. So creating a persona is not unique to blogging, but I’m willing to admit that doing so is key to a good blog.

Matt goes on to list other features that “[facilitate] the construction of a recognizable persona”:

• “its database back end (useful for sorting and searching entries)”
• “its date and time stamped organization”
• “peripherals such as blogrolls or bloglines (which situate the persona in a social network)”
• “Trackbacks and comments do this too of course, and they can be a powerful way of creating an identity for oneself online–but I don’t see them as essential to [the] process, nor would I rush to privilege them more than other means.”

First, why should we only note these features to the extent that they are involved in the creation of a persona? Second, I concede that the database backend that many (but not all) blogs have allows for multiple points of entry and rearrangement that are unique to this form of writing. Certainly there are other archives of text available via databases, but no other (that I can think of offhand) that features writing created specifically for that database–and in fact using the database as the word processor itself–by one or a small number of writers. Online news sources don’t provide the same ease of searching and sorting, for example, and many websites published by newspapers are basically the print information put into HTML.

Date and time stamps? Been there. Done that.

Situating an author in a social network? Printed books have footnotes, cover blurbs, acknowledgments pages, and works cited pages that fulfill the same function.

Take the case of Justin Hall, who I know you’ve followed for a long while–many would cite him as the “first” blogger, but he did it all without *any* formal software, and with no comments, etc.

I first came across Hall about a year after he started. I would argue that he’s in a class by himself, though, and not a representative blogger. Of course, he started using MovableType about two years ago.

They are seductive, though, those comments: the endorphin rush that comes from the contact can become an end in itself, I suspect, at least before one becomes jaded from the attention (that hasn’t happened to me yet ;-).

Yeah, see? That’s what I’m talkin’ about. Comments/trackbacks are a vulnerability, and they do provide that rush as much from fear as from excitement.

But blogging is about masks and windows, a flirtation with self and other sustained through the rhythms of update, update, update–which play into our insatiable appetite for the new, the novel . . . with a touch of the voyeur, to keep us honest.

Word.

Growing up in a military family, I lived many different places over the years. The longest time my family ever lived anywhere was Mons, Belgium: 1979-1983. I’ve mentioned this here before, but I don’t think I’ve mentioned some of the perhaps surprising parts of this experience.

First, in an age before the Internet and widespread European cable tv, we were a few years behind the times when it came to American culture. For example, I wore bell-bottoms much longer than I should have. I was still listening to ’70s rock bands when people back home had moved on to New Wave. My family had a tiny black and white tv that only picked up one station: the Armed Forces Network. I think we watched maybe an hour or two a week of the meager offerings, which were usually a year or more old. We listened to AFN radio, too, which was a very eclectic mix (hour-by-hour) of pop, rock, and country…oh, and Paul Harvey.

In the northern half of Belgium Flemish is spoken while French is the language in the southern half, where we lived. For some reason, it was deemed a good idea when we arrived to put me immediately into a French language school as opposed to the American high school all my friends attended. Mind you, I didn’t speak any French. I’m not entirely sure what the logic of that particular decision was, but it should come as no surprise to you that I did not do very well at math, Latin, social studies, and my other courses. Why? Because I didn’t speak French. Yet the reaction of the adults in my life was that my failures in school were due to my bad attitude rather than to the experience of constantly listening to lectures and discussions that sounded like Qwerpoiua apodsq po poiasduq jpqpoi dkopqrq jkp. When I manage to remember in an affective way what that experience was like, I empathize with students who have learning disabilities or who are dealing with other crises in their lives that get in the way of understanding course material as easily as others do.

This was the year of the really bad stomachaches. I began to have my first inklings that adults were not all they’re cracked up to be.

to be continued…

An email interview with one of my former professors regarding his recently published The Well-Made Book: Essays and Lectures by Daniel Berkeley Updike.

If you have access to a library with the journal Oxford Literary Review, could you do me a favor? I am reading “Technology Inside: Enlightent and Romantic Assumptions of the Orality/Literacy School” by Timothy Clark (1999) 21:57-72.

My library’s ILL department provided me with an electronic (scanned) copy of this article, but the scan lacks pages 58 & 59. I’ll ask them to fix the problem, of course, but in the interests of time perhaps someone could photocopy (or scan) those two pages and fax (or email) them to me. If this doesn’t inconvenience you terribly, please email me to let me know, and I’ll send you the fax number.

Thanks ever so much.

Inspired by JdoubleP’s example, I thought I’d put a little more prose into these music-sharing entries.

I really missed the boat with the Clash. I had a chance to go see them live in the early 1980s, and I declined. All I had ever heard from them were the handful of tracks that made it to the radio, and those didn’t really appeal to me. Years later, however, London Calling would be playing over and over as we edited the college newspaper all night on deadline. I could listen to that album forever.

When Joe Strummer died in late 2003, I decided I should go out and buy a copy of one of his recent albums: Global a Go-Go, which he recorded with a new band called The Mescaleros. My favorite track has to be the one I include below because it’s a celebration of the multicultural carnival one finds in more and more of the world.

Spoken: So anyway, I told him I was in a band. He said, “Oh yeah, oh yeah – what’s your music like?” I said, “It’s um, um, well, it’s kinda like…You know, it’s got a bit of, um, you know.”

Sung:Ragga, Bhangra, two-step Tanga
Mini-cab radio, music on the go
Surfbeat, backbeat, frontbeat, backseat
There’s a bunch of players and they’re really letting go
We got, Brit pop, hip hop, rockabilly, Lindy hop
Gaelic heavy metal fans fighting in the road
Sunday boozers for chewing gum users
They got a crazy D.J. and she’s really letting go

For your temporary listening pleasure: Bhindi Bhagee (mp3, 6.8M)

• Look for these albums, too: Streetcore and Rock Art and the X-Ray Style.
• Here’s an iTunes list of music from Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros.

MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I’m trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.