Kathleen Fitzpatrick is presenting on blogging and narrative, at Reed College.
Blogger as character: character emerges from text, and this works for blogging, "the accretional of numerous databases" (citing Dibbell). More: shared, emergent conventions, leading to a new literary mode. Steve Himmer:
As one day’s posts build on points raised or refuted in a previous day’s, readers must actively engage the process of “discovering” the author, and of parsing from fragment after fragment who is speaking to them, and why, and from where whether geographically, mentally, politically, or otherwise.
Voyeurism is part of the pleasure in reading blogs, but (I'm reminded of Crampton's argument that blogs aren't confessional) also the pleasure in co-producing content by assembling past content and the intent of reading in the future. Reading is always rereading, then, accreting and reinterpreting materials.
Exploring distinction between blog types: "serious" blogs (politics and archiving) vs diaries. Such distinctions sidestep the political nature of making private content public through blogging.
Fitzpatrick looks to a historical background for some hostility to blogging, seeing a parallel with resistance to the rise of the English-language novel. We should probably look to connections on the emergence of new subjectivity, following this parallel. Disciplinary forms appear in both, analogously. Formal similarities are present, but epistemological parallels are more powerful (self not as individual, but as part of network).
This networked subjectivity, and the historical parallel, lead to prominent questions about truth value. Example: She's a Flight Risk, which built up a large audience based on the nature of the poster's reality (Esquire investigative article, Wired piece, both 2003). Example: Where is Raed? What is the ontological status of the author? Anonymity is a challenging, pleasureable, productive threat.
Sense of self emerging in part from contemporary fiction: hence the threat of the blog, a possibility for transforming the current self.
Back to that present tense, between the accumulating archive and the future intent: always in the middle are blogs, no clear endpoint. Yes, rhizomatic like hypertext, but that's spatial, not sufficient for describing the blog, which is more temporal, diachronic, based on emergence over time. An ever-growing present, disappearing into the archive - think in terms of soap opera (especially the quotidian), seriality. Feminine form, there.
Here's Fitzpatrick's very, very cool Writing Machines class, currently going on.
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