PI. Dissing Blogging

Soon after I finished my initial reading and research for my dissertation and actually set out to physically write the thing, I simultaneously began to write on many of the same topics that preoccupy me here in various alternative forms online as well.

For one thing, and most significantly I suppose, I began to publish a personal blog in which I discuss technocultural and technoethical questions, among other things, and especially political quandaries that democratic and otherwise progressive temperaments might discern in emerging technological developments.

I say that I publish this technocriticism “among other things” in my blogging and I don’t want the “other things” conjured up in that little aside to vanish but on the contrary to dwell on them a moment.

Since this is a blog I’m talking about and not, say, a dissertation, it practically goes without saying that the discussions of technology and democracy I engage in there are mulched in together with all sorts of random commentary and editorializing about current events, flashes of momentary inspiration that lack much in the way of rigorous development or support, joking asides, links to other works online that seem important from moment to moment, sprawling and painstakingly researched discourses on various topics that drift within the field of my personal interest or what I take to be my special expertise, pregnant quotations, straightforward snark, anecdotes from my personal life, and so on. While it is by no means true that all blogs exhibit all of the idiosyncrasies of my own, these are all certainly familiar forms of the spectacle that blogging is making of itself at the moment.

The term “blog,” I probably should have already mentioned by now, is a truncation of “web-log” and refers to a regularly updated online publication the entries to which are almost always listed in chronological order, and which usually features the most recent entries most prominently.

Blogs are like dogs in that a stunning variety of beasts will pass for them. But there is at least a muzzy default morphology which many blogs will broadly approximate, consisting of a couple of columns of text or so over which a stationary masthead hovers and down which readers scroll along as they read. In these, the main column of text will tend to contain the sequential entries to the blog itself, often bristling with clickable links to other texts with which each entry is in conversation, flanked by columns containing other content, sometimes offering up a sketch of personal information about the blogger, sometimes providing space for ad copy in a usually quixotic effort at making the blog an even marginally remunerative effort, and almost inevitably containing a “blogroll” (which amounts importantly to advertising as well) consisting of a listing of links to other blogs, authors, and pieces online which each blogger recommends to the attention of their readers.

Formally and temperamentally, blogs run the gamut from the torrid exuberance of ranting pamphleteers to the staid professionalism of a paper of record. Most often, for now at least, blogs tend to resemble the entries in a personal journal or the archive of a journalist’s regularly published columns. But online publications that will be considered blogs can already exhibit an extraordinary and still proliferating range of formal characteristics in fact, and can feature any of the available varieties of media that have lately been vacuumed into ongoing digital convergence, written texts, static and moving visual images, audio, content that solicits editing, annotation, interaction, collaboration, exploration, and even outright immersion in different measures.

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