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why i read
I know that the fundamental unit of the weblog is the link, but I recently realized that I rarely click on the links posted by the authors of the weblogs I enjoy.
I can lump most of the weblogs I read into two basic camps. (I'm excluding here the weblogs I read that are maintained by people I know personally, which I read for, well, personal purposes.)
One camp is distinguished by an alignment I feel with the cultural tastes of the author. "This person likes some of the same stuff I do," goes the logic, "therefore they might also write about stuff that I would like, if I knew about it." For instance, let's say this LiveJournal, run by an experimental / psychedelic music fan. The other camp is distinguished by my interest in the ideas of the author. The author thinks about things in an interesting way, or lives an interesting sort of life, and I'm curious about the way they see things. For instance: Alamut, or Jessamyn's journal, or Synthetic Zero, or Texting. The important thing here is not so much the alignment between my ideas and theirs—I mean, all of these people are at least a bit like me, but my main interest is in seeing the world through a different lens.
Ideas, cultural products. Writing about either of these can be accentuated by links, but the link isn't fundamental.
I guess there's a third type of blog I read, what Jill would call a research blog, where the author (or authors) deliberately makes a point of linking to articles that are relevant to their research. I read the ones that are relevant to my own research, and this is the one case where I follow the links fervently.
Along these lines: Eastgate's Mark Bernstein has a weblog. Labels: weblogs |
Friday, July 19, 2002
12:10 PM
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others II
The web seems a bit slow right now.
Not slow in the sense of connection speed, but slow in the sense of "not much going on." Some of my favorite weblogs, like Idiopathic or Subterranean Notes are on summer hiatus, and my own travels around lately have only been to the sites of literary journals and indie publishers, mainly looking for material of limited interest, like contact information and writer's guidelines.
But perhaps I have spoken too soon. The interesting ideas are flying over at BlackBeltJones and City of Sound (check out this stuff on Warchalking), and I've added two new weblogs to my regular-reads list, both from Norway: jill/txt and Thinking With My Fingers. (Links to these should soon be appearing soon in the "others" column to the left.)
These are gems, but I still feel like I could be reading more webmatter than I currently am. What's the best weblog that I'm not reading? Labels: internet, weblogs |
Friday, June 28, 2002
10:53 AM
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new trends in electronic literature III
Temporal writing.
The ability to change Web texts through time (to create "time-shifted" media, to borrow a phrase from this essay) is one of the fundamental, unique properties of Web-writing, and thus it should be a key consideration for current practicioners of electronic writing. And yet I find myself surprised that so few of the current crop of electronic writers are producing work that makes use of the temporal dimension. I'm also surprised that none of the web journals that publish electronic writing make allowances for time-shifted work (to the best of my knowledge).
There's certainly a huge populist explosion of this type of writing, however. Tens of thousands of people use content management systems like Blogger and LiveJournal: these systems essentially automate the organization of material into chronological streams. I wouldn't generally consider most weblogs or LiveJournals to be "electronic literature," but there's a contiunuum here, with the hyperlinked brevity of Robot Wisdom on one end. On the other end we find the literate, essay-like entries of, say, Michael Barrish's Oblivio, Steve Cook's Snarkout, or Paul Ford's FTrain (this last also includes things that apear to be personal essays but which are actually fiction). Are these sites still weblogs? Arguable, but the important point is that these sites make use of temporality: the sites are not static, and this makes us read them differently from how we would read, say, a book of short nonfiction pieces.
When applied to fiction, temporal writing often takes the form of serialized narrative, such as Phantomnation or my own Imaginary Year. A key related text is Michael Stutz's piece, "Episodic Writing."
Forerunners of temporal writing: content-management applications, syndicated newspaper columnists, periodical narratives (such as comic books), Thomas Wolfe's episodic novels, film serials, Victorian-era serializations / series novels.
Labels: electronic_literature, narrative, time, weblogs |
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
1:03 PM
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others
Weblogs I've been looking at lately which haven't yet been added to the "others" column over there on the left include:
Labels: internet, weblogs |
Saturday, April 06, 2002
3:09 PM
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