It’s never easy to define a genre and particularly not one as new and mobile as the blog, but as a literary critic and a keen blogger, I have to admit to being fascinated by their style and structure. The whole concept of the blog has captured my imagination over the past four months, and proved immensely satisfying as a format, but why should this be? What does a blog try to express and what can blogs do that make them such a unique form of communication? The flexibility of the blog and their infinite variety are part of their charm. Blogger.com describes them as follows:“A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private thoughts. Memos to the world.” What links such disparate possibilities? What’s instantly noticeable is the way the blog cuts across any number of different genre already in existence – memoir, diary, essay, sermon, political tract, information bulletin. Yet there is a cohering factor, which is the shadowy contour of the subject who writes. The malleability of blogs makes them very responsive to the concerns and creativity of the person who is writing, providing a neatly tailored outlet for their intellectual engagement with the world. For blogging always offers a pattern of the mind that thinks, reflects, sifts information, analyses, distinguishes, recommends, enthuses. No matter what format the blogging takes, the blog reader receives a very intimate and immediate contact with a vibrant subjectivity, that is engaging with the world in the way that seems most natural and most enlivening to him or to her.
Vivian Gornick in her book The Situation and the Story; The art of personal narrative (and many thanks to Niall for recommending it to me), is attempting to refine a methodology for creating powerful and coherent works of autobiography. She recounts an anecdote of listening to a eulogy by a young medical student of the professor she had once worked with, and finds it moving and effective because the young woman remains so present within the narration. ‘The better the speaker imagined herself, the more vividly she brought the dead doctor to life’ Gornick writes, recognising here a key factor in compelling communication. Gornick talks about the way that ‘today millions of people consider themselves possessed of the right to assert a serious life. A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Everywhere in the world women and men are rising up to tell their stories out of the now commonly held belief that one’s own life signifies.’ This moment in history is, then, highly propitious for the growth of blogging, as the fundamental urge to make sense of life in narrative (the only place where it can ever be understood as being significant) is met by a user-friendly tool for rapid self-expression within a public arena. Gornick goes on to qualify the enthusiasm for self-expression by saying that ‘Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand’, and she quotes V. S, Pritchett: ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’ Now, what this suggests to me is that the blog, which in the majority of cases charts the development of the blogger’s most dearly held preoccupations in the external world, provides a very natural platform for imagining ourselves authentically by way of the things that fascinate us. Whether we are talking about computer software, or books, or celebrity gossip, the blog provides a dynamic portrait of our personal engagement with the world that by its very structure is compellingly readable.
However, that’s just one side of the coin for me. I know that I only really began blogging when people started to read my posts and respond to them. What makes blogging such a unique invention is the community element it fosters; I can think of no other example of such successful collaborative writing than the blog, which combines individual voices to make a mutli-faceted, highly responsive mosaic. A large picture created out of thousands of tiny pieces where each one plays a part in creating the contemporary, instantaneous moment. What I particularly like about this aspect of blogging is the challenge it poses to the narrowness of sanctioned authority. In an extremely interesting essay on blogging, Rebecca Blood writes: ‘In Douglas Rushkoff’s Media Virus, Greg Ruggerio of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, “Media is a corporate possession…You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation.” ’ Blogs provide precisely this kind of media public, able to intervene in any debate with alternative viewpoints, information and resolutions. They can, and often do, redress the balance of the biased individual with access to a visible media forum, by creating a wave of alternative opinion that carries a substantial weight. The opinion of the individual is no longer inconsequential in the great scheme of things.
So, for me, the blog packs its punch by emcompassing a paradox, as both a fully private and a fully public form of communication. Its power arises from linking the particular to the general, the personal to the political, and this via a form of narrative that is appealing and persuasive. Blogging provides the forum in which the dominance of culture meets the lone voice of creativity and critique, and that makes it very compelling indeed.
Tales from the Reading Room 
I couldn’t agree more with your notion that the blog packs its punch by encompassing a paradox, a fully private and fully public form of communication. The other thing I find particularly interesting about blogging is how much it seems bloggers actually affect what each other write. Those who seem to be very serious writers, lighten up in comments. Those who are hilarious writers, produce very somber comments. This gets mixed into actual posts, too. And then people post entire posts based on pieces of others’ posts — sometimes brilliant pieces that might not otherwise have been written. And immediate feedback is extrmely encouraging (and inspiring) for those who often feel they struggle with their thoughts and their writing. It’s very exciting to watch. Corporate America can talk all it wants about “teamwork” and “mentoring,” but the most pure examples of these terms, I’m discovering, seem to exist most among those with shared interests sharing space with each other online.
And there’s a perfect example of it, Emily, in the way you’ve clarified and expressed something I was sort of heading towards in the post. That’s very satisfying, I think.
A month ago I wondered if I could make a novel I had written in journal form into a blog. I have been persevering, but it isn’t working because the essence of the blog is the personal and the back and forth of reader and writer, obviously not possible when the writer is a fictional character. One aspect too of the blog that i found difficult to adjust to is that you start at a beginning but what the reader reads is the middle.
That’s very interesting, Nancy Ruth. I find it quite difficult in some kinds of blog to get back into earlier posts, as if the writing seems to have a sort of read-by date. I know there’s a lot of discussion amongst a certain section of bloggers as to how to organise the site if you want to keep previous posts within the reach of blog browsers who are new to your site. It will be intriguing to see how the technology changes in this respect.
A bit OT, but the only blog based novels that I have seen really work are the livejournal based role playing games where as well as the blog for the game, each character has their own blog where they interact with other characters, but not with the large audience who follow the game. One such is Tabula Rasa
I agree with the idea that the back-and-forth is a crucial part of blogging. I know that when a post does not elicit any comments, I don’t feel like pursuing the ideas in that post a whole lot further. In this way, blogs seem to be a lot like letters, so maybe the epistolary novel is a model to explore for what it can say about blogs.
The Gornick book sounds great. I particularly like the idea that truth in memoir comes from the sense that the writer is “working hard to engage with the experience at hand.” I do think of the blog in terms of engagement — a way actively to think through my reading and other experiences. And on what you say about authority — I’ve found myself much less likely to turn to traditional book reviewers for information on what to read since I began blogging; instead, I’ve begun to get information from people I can know in some way — people whose thought processes and preoccupations and engagements I’ve become familiar with. In this case I’m not trusting the established authority, but those with “authority” in a different sense — those who have earned my trust through their more personal, varied, “nonprofessional” writing on blogs.
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great comments for teaching genre to journalism students