a little more on danah boyd...

I finished reading the rest of danah boyd's paper. After re-contextualizing what it means to "blog" (and understanding it as a medium rather than a genre, as I understood) she goes on to talk about the blogging medium blurs "accepted distinctions such as between orality and textuality, corporeality and spatiality, private and public."

The orality and textuality bit is interesting mostly because I've been thinking of blogs as a textual medium because they involve reading and writing, but that they may be more about "speaking" in a spatial and performative way. Can a text perform?

But, the thing I found most interesting for this project is the blurring between public and private spaces... She ends up saying that it is blurred because of the various ways people think about their blogs, and what a blog is to a person: is it an expression of themselves, or is it a performance in the body of their self? Is there a difference? Whatever it is, it is already mediated through language, but her claim that perhaps the blog can function as an extention of the blogger's body because they see the blog as them she keeps saying, doesn't seem to me to be the only conclusion one can make from that. However, she does pose all these possibilities in terms of blog space: a blogger's blog is their blog, like an extension of their body, but is also something they can invite other people to take a part in sort of like a house. A blog itself as a personal space, but one in which other people can interact. Then, the blogosphere acts as a different kind of space since it holds all the houses... does it function as the truly "public" space? How can that work? What does such a space look like?

Bodies or houses: which is more private, and which can hold more potential for performance? In diary blogs, in personal blogs, are we simultaneously inviting people over (like asking your mom to read it instead of calling you all the time) and putting out a strategicially clothed and airbrushed revealing of the body? I want both of these concepts to work simultaneously and I don't know if that's how it works... is the "self" more obscured in the house of the blog where there is this whole structure of the space protecting and keeping the individual, or is the self more obscured (or mediated) when the blog is a space like a body, but you're only showing certian parts... blog as body seems really weird, but that is how they seem to function as they move within the blogosphere even if that doesn't seem to be the case in terms of how people read them.