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2007:11:21:23:39. Wednesday. GENRE 2.0. Adam Greenfield posts on what seems like a decline in blogging: No, my guess is this: in order for Technorati to retrieve content, content must be created in the first place. We’re into a period where the longer-form online writing that typefied the time that, it now seems clear, was High Blogging’s Golden Age is being eclipsed by the kind of microblogging afforded by Tumblr and Twittr and Shittr, to say nothing of del.icio.usness or the various social-networking platforms. And what people microblog is links to YouTubery, not dissections of talks they’ve just seen. At best you’ll get somebody noting that they’re “At a talk by Firstname Lastname.”
What he's really asking is not so much whether blogging is withering away, but rather, whether the expressive explosion of what some people still call "web 2.0" has faded. And it has, I suspect, for a number of reasons. Perhaps most importantly, there was a bubble there, and it fooled a lot of people who said they weren't going to get fooled again. That bubble was borne out of novelty, and out of the adjustment period that comes when we start doing something new. Do we still need to post every single boring picture we take to Flickr? Are we, as bloggers, getting anything out of the treatises Greenfield's searching for? At some point it becomes noise and it stops being any fun. At that point, we're going to start seeing more traditional content in non-traditional venues, and less diarying and self-expression dumps. Given that, it would be nice if new media scholars would start taking genre into account a little more seriously. When Greenfield asks in his post's title if "blogging per se [is] a dying art," the blogging he's talking about isn't blogging "per se," it's a particular kind of blogging. For those of us interested in studying another kind -- like, say, political blogging -- the tendency to describe blogging as if it were one thing is a real pain. It's not something that would happen with other media -- nobody looks at "television" without at least some acknowledgment of genre differences. Yet, a colleague and I came up dry over the course of hour yesterday spent looking for literature that examines readers of political blogs specifically, rather than just of blogs generally -- as far as we can tell, the only such piece is another I and three co-authors wrote which will be published soon in Cyberpsychology & Behavior. I got into an interesting but frustrating conversation about this at a conference last weekend, in which basically every speaker brought different assumptions into the discussion based on their genre interests, and I really think it's a significant problem in the study of blogs.
posted by Aaron S. Veenstra |