things I've read.

When I started this project, I was going to try to post almost every day. So far I am doing terribly. I will go forward from this point with renewed vigor or something. I will actively try to not be so self-conscious and post even when I'm not at all sure what to say. Because maybe then I will think of something to say. Even if it is two sentences.

Now. I think danah boyd might be my new hero. I am in the middle of one of her papers and it is blowing my mind. Then I googled her, read about her on Wikipedia, and found her blog, and have determined from our short acquaintance that she is really neat and knows a lot of shit. Being one of the people who has been with blogging from the beginning gives her a really interesting and formulated perspective, in addition to her initially coming to it from a computer science perspective... and I really don't know a lot about the technology side of it at all (as evident by this completely boring, really sparse looking blog)... is all really interesting to me. For right now, I just want to talk about my initial reactions to it, especially considering I haven't finished reading it yet.

Initially the most interesting (and pertinent) thing about this essay (for me) is the definition of the medium part. I guess I understand how the definition and purpose of a new medium can be hard to navigate, and it doesn't really make sense to me that people would lump 'blogs' all together as producing one kind of text (like a diary), because there are blogs about everything... but I think part of it has to do with defining what the blog is for yourself. On her personal blog, she categorizes and tags her own posts under certain things: I registered my blog on Technorati in a certain way (tagging it under "personal" and "diary" mostly because that is what it is about, more than what it is, although perhaps this distinction is sort of false... I don't consider this particularly a venue of personal expression, but it is definitely a little personal... anyway) because you want to divide things into genres. The problem with genre is not really only a factor for blogs, as I've had experiences in classes discussing genre in other narrative mediums: films, television, literature, etc... but perhaps because a blog is a new kind of narrative media, the content and the medium is getting confused. Cinema, I think, went through something sort of similar: initially, cinema was equated with something that essentially 'documented' what was in front of it... and as people's understanding and exploitation of the medium became more savvy, the understanding of what cinema was changed. Just look at the surrealists. I guess I see blogs as a primarily narrative medium because it seems like a lot of people agree that a distinguishing feature of a blog versus another sort of webpage is that blogs are presented in reverse chronological order, which I think might warrant at least a projection of a narrative rather than complete randomness... but I'm not sure how well I've developed this idea. In general though, because of the reverse chronological order thing, people generally tend to build on things they've said before at least a little bit, which signals some kind of narrative to me. But I guess literature and cinema haven't been totally narrative (again, the surrealists) so maybe that doesn't really work either.

Basically I wanted to talk about that because I am compartmentalizing and giving genre to the kinds of blogs I want to look at: the personal kind. The kind that people write things about themselves, their day-to-day existence, their to-do lists, their photos, their gripes about their families, their writing about everything and nothing. I don't really want to look at blogs that are like this: ones that are writing about something specific and not really personal at the fore. The ones about music, television, politics, books, blogging, youtube, sports, whatever... I don't want to look at those. Even though they are (in some way) a representation of the self. I want to look at ones that are self-consciously self representational. I feel a little guilty making cleavages this way and forcing genre, especially since in most of the class discussions I've been involved in have determined that genre is really limiting and not really intrinsic to texts at all... on the other hand I have to write a paper or do something more codified about all this stuff by the end of the semester and the internet is way too big to be looking at everything all the time (in the manner of the oft-updated blog) especially when I am totally new to this medium. So maybe I will figure out a way to address that, but for right now I am comfortable with being aware that I am only looking at one kind of blog, which doesn't represent all blogs or the medium of blogging, but still looking at what the medium does to this one kind of genre. If that makes sense.

That might just be totally tangential to what she's saying in her paper, but it is making me think of all kinds of cool things, and I am definitely totally digging it.