The Pre-Industrial Blog
Published April 21, 2003
Some of these threads are entirely off-topic, as in the practice of Victorian and pre-Victorian lovers, prevented by social strictures from conversing in privacy, exchanging encrypted messages by marking and annotating certain passages in books that passed between them. Parodies were penned to mark a negative critical judgement, such as the verse scribbled onto the end of a maudlin poem in a Scottish book on the etiquette of courtship: "As large a fool as ever lacked a brain / Now hear the answer of the bitch again."
Kenneth Grahame, author of the Wind in the Willows once wrote an essay suggesting the margins were more interesting than the text itself, Jackson recounts, "and wondered when the world might hope for 'a book of verse consisting entirely of margin.'" A friend promptly provided him with a blank book titled "Margins." But, Jackson says, the joke was a bad one, for a book without text is book in which no marginalia can be written — just as there could be no Web logs without the web.
A central figure in Jackson's argument is, of course, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, possibly the first major author to practice marginalia as a profession. Readers and authors flocked to Coleridge with blank books for the poet and philosopher to annotate in his inimitable style, much as we blogwhores sometimes boast of the contribution of an alpha bloggers in our comments, or, better yet, of a TrackBack or some linky love from the Blogdex Top 100.
Coleridge was something like a very popular poster to a user forum. To help his friend Bob Southey meet his deadline for a review of Thomas Malthus's Metafilter , as I know first-hand, to my own occasional chagrin.
- The Pre-Industrial Blog
- Published: April 21, 2003
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- Section: Sci/Tech
- Filed Under: Sci/Tech: Internet, Books: Literature and Fiction, Culture: Media
- Writer: Colin Brayton
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- Colin Brayton's personal site
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Well said! I respect that point of view, but have this contrarian streak of cultural conservatism that makes me pipe up with the old French cliché, "the more things change, the more they remain the same" whenever possible. And genre politics are dangerous ground. I just loved the idea of a scholar writing a book legitimating scribbling in the margins as a legitimate object of literary study. For more of the similar, try The Footnote: A Curious History and The Devil's Details: A History of the Footnote.
I', still convinced that blogging is just one of many similar "movements" -- compare, for example, to CB radio use in the 70's. Technology permitted the whole populace to become broadcasters, then quickly devolved into stereotypical social grooming, eventually sliding back to its original practically-purposed form before being largely usurped by celphones. So much for a revolution in consciousness.
"We got a great big convoy, nothin's gonna get in our way ... con-voy ..." I tend to agree with you. There's actually very little "social networking" going on in blogging these days. It's mainly about self-promotion, BlogShares, wanting in on the Drudge action. On the other hand, the CB craze may have died, but CB is still in wide use among truckers to spot those smokies. So maybe there's life after the media hype for the folks who are in it, pardon the pun, for the long haul.
This is a splendid choice of a book to use to gloss the mode of blogging, metaleptically, as it were, and most suggestive as it suggests both the marginal properties of blogs as well as their ability to "switch" and become the primary texts for other bloggers to annotate. An infinite series of mutually annotating marginalia, each with the power to confer primacy upon the other. Cool.
I'll have to take the time to read this later to see if you've actually said anything, but it seems like an interesting topic.
That is all.
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(Or ping: http://blogcritics.org/mt/tb/4750)
That is fascinating!
What this illustrates to me is that the tools created by the internet are once again being adapted for use towards impulses we have long felt.
It is not surprising that we want to share our opinions on events/information/literature with others. And it is useful to read what others have to say.
But trying to tag blog with a genre designation, trying to tag any dynamic production with a genre designation, is an after-the-fact exercise.
Blogs are changing, the web is changing. It may be very useful to categorize past postings, just to try and discover patterns.
But this is a living, very vital form of expression. It's not through evolving yet.