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December 20, 2004
What is blogging?...
Tim, aka The Questionator, asked me what are the structural biases of blogging following from my discussion of such biases in journalism.
That's a good question and something interesting to think about, especially now that blogging has achieved the cultural limelight, or, rather, has become an important part of our noetic field as an open-source form of journalism. For more on this today, check out Jay Rosen's two most recent posts here and here.
Journalism has structural biases because there exists a structure--professional practice within organizations with commercial intentions--that we may observe and describe. This structure is institutional, i.e. it has rules.
What is the structure and/or institution of blogging?
None to speak of. (I'm often amused by articles that purport to tell us how to blog well. For every rule or suggestion we may see dozens of examples of the opposite done well. There are no rules; there is no institution. Hmmmmmm...but a structure? I wonder.)
And that's a really interesting thing because it means (non, contra, sans, anti)-institutional blogging may have a greater impact on institutional journalism than journalism will have on blogging. I say "may" because we are witness to an ongoing revolution. We don't know where this is going, although we have many interesting ideas.
An aside: This spring semester, two of my three classes will write for a blog, and the third will produce a web project. (The project from this past semester is under construction--held up a bit because I've had the flu. I should have it all uploaded by the end of this week. But you may check the progress here.) In my News Writing & Reporting class, students will have an open-source journalism assignment. They will have to develop, report, and write an article for Wikinews or another open-source news site.
So are there structural biases in blogging? I think there is a narrative bias in most, if not all, human communication. So to say that blogging has a narrative bias isn't saying much unless we can show that a narrative structure leads to some interesting or troubling results. We can show such results for journalism.
I would have said as recently as a year ago that blogging has a tech-media bias because it relies on a second-hand experiences of reality. But we may see now that the technology also allows (e.g. camera phones) us to get out into the world and bring real experiences back to our computer screens.
John C. Dvorak takes a look at the elements of blogging. This is certainly a good beginner's guide to reading blogs. Does it describe blogging structure?
To some extent yes. These are genre elements, i.e. that which makes a blog recognizable as a blog. I almost hesitate to use the word "genre" here because a few of the elements Dvorak describes could be eliminated without affecting our understanding of the resulting product as a blog. Genre is certainly structure, but such elements are not quite the structure I'm wondering about. If you eliminate or change a genre element, you change the genre. Would journalism change if its practitioners gave up on the fairness bias? Yes, and for the better. But we would still recognize the product as journalism. Take the romance out of a romance novel and you have--what? Blogging is certainly a genre. But what is its structure?
Hmmmmmm...
Posted by acline at December 20, 2004 10:56 AM | | Spotlight