October 9th, 2007 Fred McVittie
The online blog has a passing similarity to a number of other digital knowledge structures, most specifically the hypertext and the wiki, and it is instructive to consider some of these similarities, and also of the significant differences. Also, the much greater paradigmatic difference between all of these digital forms and the analogue form of print material are sufficiently large to warrant special attention.
Apart from obvious material differences, and the equally obvious variations in access afforded by technologies of knowledge which use the screen rather than on the page, there is nothing that can be bound between the pages of a book that cannot be put onto a screen. Conversely however, the technologies of the digital environment offer the possibility of including types of information, (video, sound, animation), which cannot be reproduced in analogue form. More importantly, digital media offers ways of navigating information, and indeed structuring information, which are radically different to the book, essay, monograph, article, or thesis.
The two most significant strategies for the reading of digital material, and which distinguish it from print media, are the browse and the search. Browsing allows the reader to move through the text in a way which is non-linear, and therefore requires that the author of that text take into account this non-linearity in their writing. Typically this may involve the presentation of a number of different ways into and out of a specific piece of information. The familiar links on a web page which invite the browsing reader to follow the logic of their own reading process is a obvious example. This has the effect that most digital knowledge resources have the feeling of a net(work) rather than a story, or argument. The logic of the browse, at least for most online resources, also blurs the edges of the text such that the most casual click on a link takes the reader imperceptibly across the planet to information on another server, another site, another body of text. This trailing into and out of the home text may be formalised in the language of the deli.cio.us tag list, or may appear covertly behind the hexadecimal blue of an unfollowed link word. (Not to by confused with a fake link simulating that blue, and that underlining, but which in reality leads nowhere).
Searching, on the other hand, gives the opportunity to the reader of making a proactive entrance into the body of the text. Search results respond to the desire of the reader, who may disregard the obvious and sanctioned reading order in favour of a specific probing advance. Not only that, but search also organises and edits the entirety of the text into a collation thematically arranged under the heading of the search term. The blog writer may assist such acts of collative creation by the use of suggested search terms or labels.
These systems of knowledge construction and retrieval are common to many digital media products. The specific forms noted above, the blog and the wiki, add specific additional features to this list which increase their distinction from print media.
The defining feature of the wiki is that it is (usually) a collaborative form. Its charm is that large, sometimes very large, groups of people have access and editing rights and can add, subtract, or change the content of the wiki at any time. The blog also has the option of allowing collaborative creation, although this is usually only to the extent of facilitating the attachment of comments to a posting. The other, and perhaps most unique, feature of blogs is that any posting on a blog is time-stamped, which gives a layer of structure that is largely absent from hypetext and wikis. Time stamping means firstly that blogs tend to reflect, and reflect upon, events and issues which are contemporaneous in a way which is impossible in other media. Whilst it is certainly true that a book or article will usually try to be current, and to include an up-to-date set of references and referents, it would be unusual for these references to change from one page to the next. This is exactly what one would expect from a blog however; as event transpire in the wider world, or in the slightly less wide discipline to which the blog refers, then the writing on the blog shifts to include these events. News items of deaths and wars appear alongside discoveries and gallery openings, and these writings are dynamically related to the times in which the blog is written. On a more personal, processual level, as information becomes available to the blogger through the course of their own experience and study, then this too makes a gradual appearance. Rather than the entire document appearing as if it were written at one sitting, in the full light of acquired knowledge, as is often the case with the book, there is the gradual accumulation of the light, and the progressive journey through different knowledge sources.
The blog, then, has a temporal structure which is absent from other digital media forms, and which is absent from print. Firstly it is located across a swathe of historical time rather than a cross-section, which gives it an internal structure containing growth, progress, and change. Secondly it is embedded and interconnected to the moving moment of contemporaneity at multiple points and many different levels; the health of one’s children, the death of a prince, the newest operating system from Microsoft, an uprising in Burma, a song that right now seems to be everybody’s ringtone, the time now is 16:18 and outside my window are two young men smoking cigarettes. One of them has seen me and waves. His name is Matt.
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