Blogdriver
I was caught by a turn of phrase on pretty serendipities: “One of the pleasures of diving in and out of blogging is revisiting old favorites and reaffirming fondness for their offerings.”. Of course, reading quickly as I usually do, I misread it—I would have sworn she said “driving.” Hence, I immediately found myself conceptualizing a tool, a “blogdriver,” if you will. It might be something like a screwdriver, or it might be something like a taskmaster who would force someone to persist in the blog habit. Sometimes the mondegren is more striking than what was really said.
I’ve never been able to accept the whole “blogs are conversations” thing. Usually, when I conceptualize my audience, it’s a weird hybrid of my conception of myself and my conception of the people who have visited me for a long time. It’s very much like a friendship, and you don’t want to bore either yourself or your regular visitors. But all the same, the tinge of guilt one feels at walking away in the middle of a conversation is much stronger than the guilt one might experience from not being a good “blogger” in those times when you really have other things to do. A person can slip in and out the door easily and largely unnoticed. It’s a big community, and while conversation occurs, it isn’t a necessary prerequisite for participation. And it is of a substantially different tone than conversation in other venues. The degree to which some people “just don’t get it” is not surprising.
Ping
Ping is such an odd little word. In network terms, it amounts to a sort of detection. If your ping is answered, then you know something is there. But this fundamental part of network behavior is changing because of automated garbage. The surrender was swift and seemingly final. I don’t understand.
I suppose I will never really surrender my romantic conception of authorship—that is authorship which is equated with both control and responsibility. I never used blogger (except in the classroom) because I want to have control over the disposition of my data. More and more, aspects of the social behavior on the web are co-opted by aggregators. I find little difference between Technorati, Bloglines, or Google. It all amounts to social control of interaction, whether by algorithm or hive-mentality. It is a shift into the privileging of founders of discursivity over authorship. Page-rank matters more than expertise, and the origin matters less than the interconnection with a common source.
People fight for the right to comment because it is, in effect, a scrawling on the margins of someone else’s thought. Commenters don’t want to be silenced because someone might abuse the privilege. However, the ability to produce derivative works from other works and give them the courtesy of a personal ping to tip the hat must now be channeled through the likes of “Ask Jeeves” or other tracker of popularity. The net just got colder, in my estimation. Not because the relatively private tool of pinging has been surrendered, but because nobody noticed. It seems really easy to abdicate the responsibility for “cleaning one’s own yard” to another service. But this is, I believe, something that must be paid for.
The communities are being enclosed into neighborhoods; I think I’d rather stay in my cardboard hut on the edge of town. I don’t need a butler to clean up my trash. I don’t mind using these net butlers help to “fetch” things for me, to track and sort lists of things. But controlling interaction is another matter entirely. I think controlling and being responsible for my own writing is important—and this includes maintaining the communication channels which, at least for now, I have left open.
Hard Things
I told myself years ago that I was not going to continue to beat my head against the words of difficult poets. I thought I had broken free, but for days now I’ve been reading Milton and Blake, Yeats and Keats. I told myself to keep my nose in the rhetoric of science in photography. It didn’t work. I can’t help but try to cut a few agates.
I was busy with a single art, that of a small, unpopular theatre; and this art may well seem to practical men busy with some programme of industrial or political regeneration—and in Ireland we have many excellent programmes—of no more account than the shaping of an agate; and yet in the shaping of an agate, whether in the cutting or in the making of the design, one discovers, if one have a speculative mind, thoughts that seem important and principles that may be applied to life itself. Certainly if one does not believe so, one is but a poor cutter of so hard a stone. (Yeats, Essays, 219)
Teaching today, I felt compelled to talk about how hard writing is. It is a social activity performed in private—essentially oxymoronic to the core. How one perceives the social aspect depends on the construction of an audience for the piece. In Paradise Lost, Milton was the vehicle for the heavenly muse to transmit his explanation to mortal man. However, in Areopagitica Milton was an author making a speech. Much is said of the prominence of his name on the title page; little is said of the fact that “speech” appears in boldface type larger than any other word. Books are born and have a life all their own; speeches can only be made by a human voice. The audience for the former breaks the boundaries of time; the latter speaks of responsibility. Books, it might be argued, have no real responsibility. However, it must be granted that some form of “social contract” applies to both.
