Early in the semester, we asked the question 'What is a blog?' John McCain has a definitive answer. In a new and frightening piece of legislation a blog is defined as "any site that allows comments, authors and personal profiles." His bill proposes that blog sites be responsible for all content in their comments and user profiles. Its ostensible purpose is to curb the distribution of child pornography, but in reality its effects will be much more wide-ranging. Blogs are required to report any illegal images or videos that are posted or face stiff fines. Bloggers will have to police themselves, and since they may not know whether an image is copyrighted or "legal" some might have to shut down rather than risk paying the huge fines.

I just had a huge “duh” moment about this blog.

Has it felt really strange to anyone else to come this far in the semester without receiving any grades or, other than on the progress updates of our final projects, major professorial feedback? I know it’s felt weird to me; I’m accustomed to classes that operate on the midterm/final structure, with a few mini-grades in between, where by the end of the semester you’re more or less clear on your standing grade-wise. That got me thinking about the feedback we have gotten in this class -- there's been a ton, and it’s all come in the form of our own comments on one another’s blog posts.

I love when, near the end of the semester, I begin see connections between materials in my different classes that I never thought I would find. This recently happened to me in my “Women’s Magazines and the Female Journalist” class at CMC when we learned about zines. Although it’s difficult to describe what zines are in one sentence, they are typically self published, not-for-profit magazines, and, in the context of my CMC class, we learned about zines written by and for girls. I knew nothing about zines—I don’t even think I had heard the term before coming to my class—but I immediately saw many intersections between them and blogs. Although zines are still flourishing, it seems like blogs are becoming the zines of today. Both pride themselves in allowing users to “speak” (or write) in an informal, unpolished, and more “natural” way. They are real voices (as much as printed words can represent a voice), and, in both, the writers are very open and honest.

I wanted to share with you all something that happened to me over Thanksgiving break that I think you might appreciate. My family went over to our family friends' house for Thanksgiving dinner, and I was talking with the daughter, who is my age and goes to school at George Mason University, a Virginia state school, about this and that-- how our semesters had been.

And then she mentioned that one of her classes had a blog! I got really excited (embarassingly so, now that I think back on it) and asked her how it was incorporated into the class. Apparently, their blog's purpose is to serve as a place where they post their responses to the readings, 2x a week. The subject of the class has nothing to do with technology-- it's on the reconstruction of post-WWII Japan. And it seems like the blog doesn't really change the nature of the class in any fundamental way-- I'm not even sure if they comment on each other's posts-- but that it's just a way for the professor to collect reading responses such that students can also read their classmates' responses.

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Some see blogs as poor substitute for novels because they so often seem too personal to be taken for art. One could object that the intrusive I, traditionally typical of immature or unpracticed authors, is symptomatic of the flood of amateurs who blog. But I doubt this will hold empirically. Plenty of blogs deal impersonally with external subjects. (I like to read Noam Chomsky's blog occasionally, for example). But these blogs not only seem unbloggy (debloggé?), they resemble exposition, not narrative.

Apparently, if the author or narrator doesn't get in and throw a few low punches, no one else does either.

If experimental hypertexts generally suffer from syntagmatic discontinuity, a solution may have already arrived.

We’ve done a lot of meta-blogging -- blogging about blogs -- on this site. We’ve blogged about reading blogs; we’ve blogged about writing (or not writing) blogs; we’ve taken lots of different angles on attempted classifications and categorizations of the blog; we’ve talked about the weirdnesses particular to a class blog where credit and grades are involved -- the increased potential for perfectionism, anxiety, self-consciousness, and how these very writer-blocking neuroses are at least in some measure related to the fact that we all have access to a list that attaches names and faces to our blog aliases.

In this post, I want to deal with this class blog in particular, and to do so in a personal and non-theoretical way.

One of Jill Walker's ideas that I sort of struggled with was her claim that blogs could collectively function as a sort of hypertext--collaborating to form an authored work.

I personally think of the authorship question in blogs as stemming from the blogger/commentator relationship--the creation of a text that talks back (think Ong and Plato from the beginning of the year). Walker claims in Distributed Narrativethat "the story of a weblogger is described is [sic] by the story being told by several different narrators on their independent sites." She expands a bit more on this in the Feral article, discussing the blog-diarist Justin Hall, specifically her view that his blog could be read as a hypertext through many different lenses. For instance she claims that "I could choose to limit it by authorship, as Foucault suggests, in which case I would choose to look at everything Hall has written. Or I could choose to limit by the main character in the narrative, Justin Hall, in which case I would look at his girlfriends' blogs and other writings about him as well."

Jan Pronk was a UN envoy in Sudan who got expelled from the country for comments he made on his blog. This article details how the Sudanese government accused him of "psychological warfare" for blogging about two defeats government troops suffered in Darfur. His blog contains highly sensitive diplomatic information, the kind "normally sent back, encoded, only to national capitals."

Today, October 17, the British organization History Matters is organizing the largest blogging event in history. Asking all UK citizens to contribute a blog entry about their day which will become part of a "mass blog for the national record." The blog will be stored in the British National Library and serve as a detailed snapshot at individual lives in the 21st Century.

I wonder if future historians will be thrilled with this foresight or repulsed by the idea of slogging through thousands and thousands of blogs. Also, I'm curious how blogs will be viewed in context as historical documents. Is a truly comprehensive picture of a historic era one that features every single voice of every person living in that time and place, as the ultimate goal of One Day in History seems to be? Is there even any need for history if every voice is preserved? Would it turn into more of a sociological profession, tracking social trends and the effects on the individuals?