Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books
H.J. Jackson
Yale University Press, 2001
There's an interesting discussion going on here, everywhere in the blogosphere about what kind of literary genre the blog might be. A full-on academic
This kind of breathless futurism — "where no man has gone before" — always makes me snort, although I like Digital Genres ' insistence on the point that "a cultural critic who writes about video games without playing them is as incongruous as an art historian who has never been inside a museum." I feel the same way about journalists who write about whether or not blogging is "real journalism" without engaging actively in establishing an active social network, even if they do post their own pearls of wisdom to a blog that's really nothing more than a self-promotional monologue — a "blogologue"? Although H.J. Jackson, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, does not explicitly set out to write a history of blogging before the invention of electricity, much less the rise of digital communications, I want to suggest that in some ways, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books , is just that: A careful study of the modes of social-network formation by people who circulated and annotated published material, and annotated the annotations of others, over the past three centuries. Jackson's survey of the subject is based on a careful empirical study in the archives of the English-speaking world, "the examination of more than two thousand annotated books in great public or academic libraries." Her findings are fascinating. Among the topics discussed is the death of annotation with the rise of the public library, and with it, the stern commandment drilled into all of us from kindergarten: "Thou shalt not write in library books." Consider this development in light of the disputes between proprietary and open source software projects. Thou shalt, or thou shalt not, or thou may betimes, with certain conditions, alter ye source code.
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Article comments
1 - Murphy
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.
2 - blogalization
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.
3 - Kevin Bjorke
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.
4 - iggy
"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.
5 - tom m
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.
6 - Bob A. Booey
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.