Joan Didion: The Salon Interview

The idea of something being there prior to the invention of writing is interesting to me in light of the readings we have done this week. It seems as if all of the authors are talking about both inventing something new via blogging (genre, information system, epistemology) by using a form of technology (html and the web ) and genre of writing (diary and/or epistolary) that has been there. So it seems as if blogging can be seen as an intervention (?) or perhaps a better term would be intersection between the past/present, public/private, visible/invisible. And therefore, it gives us a way to occupy spaces that have traditionally been kept apart through our beliefs and practices.

Now I may be pushing the epistemic angle of blogging further than the readings, but I don't think that I am being disrespectful to any of the authors we have read because they all seem to be articulating ways in which blogging can challenge and/or change how academics can construct themselves in non-traditional spaces, which follow non-traditional, and perhaps evolving, methods and conventions.

The idea of a blog as a receptacle for ideas and materials that are constantly influx, re-imagined, and circulated is very productive to my thinking about how different stories create images of "people" who then have to choose to accept those images or challenge them. But before I get ahead of myself, I want to share a list that I am attempting to think through and don't quite have a handle on. What it is ... is the charting of "things" that the three articles we read for today discuss as visible or invisible in blogging.

Visible: 1) the process of writing -- through links, chronology, short entries, and daily occurrences blogs show how people think about things when they think about them. Mortensen and Walker discuss this in-terms of the lack of analyzing and systematizing of the product in blogs allows for a freer (?) version of the author's writing process. 2) private thoughts -- seemingly insignificant details of the everyday, discussions between friends via comments, and personal reflections on a variety of topics on blogs make the private become public. van Dijck discusses this at length. 3) the private -- as in the spaces outside of the public realm. For Habermas, this was the essential space (a home and house to protect) needed in order for people to come together in public to debate. Mortensen and Walker discuss Habermas' analysis of the conflation of the public and private spheres, and I am not sure but I think that blogging may disrupt this while codifying it. (Still thinking this one through.)

Invisible: 1) the material text -- pages, paper, the concrete proof of publication. All of the authors for this week touched on these ideas in differing ways. They show how the lack of material can lead to distrusting the information, as well as freeing the writer to be more open with their writing. 2) the Public -- the salon and spaces of interchange described by Habermas have become invisible. They are now links pages and comments made by disembodied people in abstract space. The networks are there, but they cannot be seen. This creates a challenge when trying to think about the blogosphere as a new public realm.

I have not fully fleshed out these concepts, but I will say that I think looking at blogging as a site that can represent our shifting expectations of knowledge and knowledge production is important. Although I am not sure if blogging is merely representative, or if it is affecting the change. Things that make me go hmmmmmm.