Ich bin kein Blogger
Hats off to Simon Dumenco, who writes in the January 16 issue of Advertising Age magazine,
"...there is no such thing as blogging. There is no such thing as a blogger. Blogging is just writing—writing using a particularly efficient type of publishing technology. Even though I tend to first use Microsoft Word on the way to being published, I am not, say, a Worder or Wordder. It's just software, people!"
5 Comments:
Isn't that akin to saying there's no such thing as journalism, and no such thing as a journalist? (Since there writing goes into a journal)
True but false: he misses the point.
Blogging isn't about writing, it's about a particular kind of unmediated, two-way communication with intimate strangers and unknown friends. Blogging is a mentality of sharing - ideas, time, effort - and (for some of us some of the time) of baring your soul. Blogging shares among near-equals, traditional publishing is like receiving a benediction: Here is the truth, swallow it.
IMHO the two most significant differences between blogging and e.g. publishing something in the Advertising Age are, first in the feedback, and secondly in the malleability. Blogging allows readers to comment back, and the comments are seen as an extension of the original article. Anyone can read them, anyone can reply to them.
Blogging allows for correction, in a way that publishing cannot. If you (Sass) make a mistake, your readers will point it out and you can fix it - all future readers will automatically see the fix in context.
Try making a change in that article from AA. Even were Dumenco to agree that he were wrong, the best that they could do would be to print a one- or two-sentence correction in the next issue. The original error continues to circulate, and there is no way to collate the article and its correction.
I thought it was un-bloggerly to go back and correct errors? Of course, I do it all the time but then I've never considered myself to be a typical blogger. I guess that's why I liked Dumenco's rant. While I agree with you, Udge, that a blog is a particular form of published writing, just like a novel or a magazine, and therefore deserves its own term, I agree with Dumenco that a blogger is more properly called a writer. I've always felt that people who refer to themselves as "bloggers" are implying that blogging is not writing; that writing is somehow not cool, but blogging is. Like the boys in my grade five class who wouldn't sing in music class because they thought it was uncool, yet by highschool they all wanted to be in bands.
your interpretation of blogging versus writing is kinda the opposite of mine. I may never consider myself a writer, but I may be a blogger. I am an amateur. To call myself a writer is somehow to aggrandicize myself - to call myself a blogger, it's just something I like to do for fun.
--of course, then there're blogs like yours that throw the 'amateur' descriptor out the window.
Ah, yes, the vexed question of self-description, vanity of vanities. I would say that I am a blogger, not a writer, because apart from my blog I do not write; for the same reason, although I have and use a stove and saucepans, I don't call myself a cook.
There are indeed sheep and goats among the bloggers, the vast majority of blogs are by (spiritually and/or physically) 13-year-old unthoughtful babblers, just as these dominate the majority of chatrooms.
Dumenco probably spent too much time randomly flipping around the blogosphere, and therefore saw too many of these. He clearly didn't grok the Blogroll concept. Had he started with e.g. Sass and followed the links to the sites that you like, he would probably have come to the same conclusion but would have had much more fun on the way.
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