#ToBlogOrNotToBlog

This week our readings dive into the very important question of, "What is a blog?." In a piece by Mary Garden, on defining blogs, she gives direct quotes from a Pew Research project about the defining of blogs. Pew Project director Lee Rainie says:

 "I would say absolutely we’re dealing with a term that is not particularly well defined because            blogging is a platform. Blogs can be so many different things to so many different people. The            definition needs to be more about structure than content."

Jeff Jarvis, veteran journalist and blogger, takes a radical position: 

"There is no need to define ‘blog’. A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content … Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘blog’ is a fool’s errand."

Boyd found through her ethnographical research that veteran bloggers were usually irritated by the definition question, finding it a futile exercise. For example, ‘Carl’ says: 

"I’ve given up on definitional questions and gone for these tautologies. Like blogging is what we do when we say, ‘We’re blogging.’ … It’s a blog because a blogger’s doing it … It’s a blog because bloggers are engaged with it, and everyone points at it and says ‘It’s a blog!’"

So what does this mean? If researchers cannot define a over twenty year-old phenomenon, can we? Or does the definition even matter? I believe that to those who blog or know about blogs it doesn't. The increasing number of blogs over the past ten years have shown us that somehow this idea is spreading and it is giving different spectrum of people in completely different parts of the world a way to reflect and connect, defined or not. 

The next article by Torill Elvira Mortensen discusses the main purpose of our whole semester; as well as, the stigma of blogging in the academic culture. This author disscuss the movement and purpose of blogs as being more of a "middle-brow" consumed market, and all but slams the middle-class working blogger by stating, "The common practice of blogging is rarely dominated by clear, touching prose, deep academic thinking, or political debate." While there are two separate and distinct groups, middle-brow and high-brow, 

While there tends to be a vast difference in the two classes of blogging, one for more of a diary use and one for professional research, that does not mean that the two cannot mix. Because, I believe to write a blog, academic or personal, you must in some way put forth your personal opinion about the subject which blurs the lines a bit between strictly subjectively academic, and personal. This seems to be, in my opinion, the issue for the stigma. Blogs have retained this impression to be strictly for our diary use, but they are not. They can be used in ways to further education, such as this course. 

This article, like the third one on Power Laws, show that a certain group of people are making up and deciding what is needing to be read; however if there were more blogs to choose from, these power laws might actually turn into more bell curves, giving some balance between academia and society.

I will leave you with a quote from Mortensen: 

"Ultimately, communication happens as human beings create meaning from a set of signals which we can call signs. The practice of receiving and communicating this meaning is where we need to look, if we wish to make an attempt at breaking out of the symbolic universe within which we have all been trained. Weblogs and webloggers have one advantage in this attempt."