The Pre-Industrial Blog
Published April 21, 2003
Marshall McLuhan 's dictum that "the medium is the message" is all too often cited these days, but it is just as often misunderstood when it comes to the novelty of "new media," I believe. Few casual McLuhanites recall that McLuhan began his career as a scholar of medievalism in the works of Joyce, as Donald Theall describes very well in an essay called "Beyond the Orality-Literacy Dichotomy: James Joyce and the Prehistory of Cyberspace," which you will find hosted at the EFF. Whatever the implications of multimedia for the way we receive and process information, and despite the coming of audio and video blogging — Who needs them? Where's the links? Blah, blah, blah. Ooh, bad hair day — the blog remains a literate activity.
Even Netscape-Mozilla's Talkback system, which automates bug reporting in new builds of the open source browser, has deep precedents in cultural history. The Spanish writer Don Juan Manuel [1282-1348], for example, was the very first author to publicly promote a scheme for preventing the errors that accumulated as his work was distributed through the process of manual copying.
In the prologue to the Libro del Conde Lucanor, he instructed readers that he had placed a fair copy of the book in the care of a certain monastery in Castille. Any reader wanting to emend his own copy need only refer to the reference copy. The process is the same, it's simply that we've automated it: My XP machine now informs me automatically of the latest bug patch from the Kingdom of Redmond.
"Nothing is new under the sun," says the Preacher. That's my retort to the "new media" and the "new economy," and I'm sticking to it. The only difference is that now anyone can do it . Some say that when any idiot can do it, most of the people doing it will be idiots. This may be true, but our interactive social networks can also teach us how to be less idiotic.
- 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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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.
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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.