[part one of my communications thery final paper about blogs. i'll post the rest when i write it]
Progressing as we are through the third millennium of the Common Era, it would be nearly impossible to reasonably deny the all-encompassing nature of our relationship with the media. Throughout the twentieth century, invention after invention has been introduced to the public, and has subsequently reinvented not just the way we perceive information (and their consumption of it), but also our perception of the world as a whole. The relevance and impact that mediums such as radio, cinema, television and most recently the internet have on our lives is immeasurable. We depend on them to inform and entertain us, to fill our spare time satisfactorily and to teach us moral lessons. They have become so entwined in our lifestyles that without them the majority of us would find that we have no way to fill our time. For these reasons it seems that the development and rising popularity of a new medium of communication, especially one which re-evaluates the traditional relationship between broadcaster and receiver, is both interesting and relevant as an event in our cultural landscape. Thus the emergence of the personal web log (or BLOG), as an exponentially developing internet phenomenon, is deserving of careful analysis.
The term blog (created through a condensation of weblog) is used to describe a wide variety of sites, loosely clumped together by both technical and conceptual similarities, which together represent an online trend that has been gaining speed significantly since 2000. One definition, as put forward by J. Barger in his “Weblog Resources FAQ”, designates a weblog as a website, kept in reverse chronological diary format, that is both on the web, because that is where it is located, and of the web, in that serves as a portal, through hyperlinks, to other websites.1 This definition, though generally accurate, falls short of describing the essential nature of the blog. The true heart of the phenomenon comes from the emergence of software packages which allow a user, even one with no knowledge of hypertext markup whatsoever, to develop and constantly update a web page at the click of a button (blogger.com, a blog hosting service uses “Push Button Publishing for the People” as its slogan).2 This ease of use leads to an unprecedented “electronic empowerment” of the unskilled masses on web, allowing them a chance to have their voices (metaphorically, as well as literally, given such audio-blogging services as www.audblog.com) heard by the entire connected world. A cornucopia of hosting services (www.blogger.com, www.livejournal.com, www.diaryland.com, www.diary-x.com) generally offering both free and paid subscriptions, offer simple and instantaneous ways to setup and maintain such sites.
This description, of course, does not state any requisites in terms of content, and one of the most important aspects of the blogging phenomenon is that, though there are traits and themes that are common, there are no set rules concerning what is and isn’t appropriate to discuss. Many blogs serve as private outlets, personal sites where the creator discusses their lives for their friends and families. Others, and these are commonly the most popular, serve as link portals, forwarding their readers to locations throughout the net which the creator thinks would be of interest to them. Still others are used for storytelling or poetry, or even photography. The common metaphor when discussing a blog is that of the journal or diary, and the vast majority of blogs, and blog adaptations such as comic-blogs or photo-blogs, fall into this category. However it is in the other meanings of the word “log” that the true power of blogs is to be found. It can serve as a location for editorial discussion of recent events or art, as a location for conceptual discussion of theory, or a medium for the publication of artistic works themselves. Also the possibilities in terms of “learning blogs”3 and business blogs hold tremendous practical potential. The blog is a dynamic and democratic medium that can be adapted to almost any communicative goal imaginable, and, with well over a million blogs currently active (as well as over 2 million having been created but not updated in the last two months)4, blogging has inarguably become an important aspect of how the internet functions and how users interact with it.
posted by Jer Clarke at 01:21
