image credit: Andrew*
Yesterday Rebecca Thorman contested that “bloggers are not writers” and “blogging is not writing.”
I happen to disagree, but this not really about disagreement. This is about rethinking our basic understanding of writing.
This is about boiling down the underlying implications of Thorman’s ideas in an effort to hold them, to examine them, to test them.
I’m deeply indebted to Thorman’s post and presentation as the start of this conversation, so first: Thank you Rebecca. And now to our point of departure…
A Trajectory, not a Definition
Consider for a moment that writing is not limited by a set of fixed definitions, but is instead a trajectory.
Or maybe a possibility.
Or perhaps the possibility of trajectory.
But never fixed and defined.
The problem with the assertion that “bloggers are not writers,” is that the statement assumes we have the authority to say what is and what is not writing.
Sure, in a common sense way, we preform this sort of function all of the time. It’s how we determine the crayon doodle on the back of a Denny’s placemat isn’t writing.
But to be more clear, setting limits on writing by stating that “bloggers are not writers” assumes that we can lift the veil of language (the symbol “writing”) and find behind the curtain the real essence of “writing” devoid of language.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never seen “writing” sitting on my kitchen counter. I’ve seen books and newspapers there, but never “writing” as such.
To those who argue that definitions are constructed by communities (that we set definitions in a social structure). I don’t completely disagree. But I’ve invited society over for dinner more than once, and it’s never shown up.
What I’m trying to say is, it’s impossible to officially draw the limits of a word based on social usage alone. This means that Webster’s is more a snapshot than a guide.
Writing has never been about originality
One of the arguments leveled at blogging is that it isn’t original, that it’s base appeal panders to the crowd, perpetuating the myth that collective thought is better than individual thought.
But writing, no matter how private, is never individual or original.
Consider the “subject” (the author) of writing. Who writes? How is meaning transferred? We’ve long since moved beyond the intentional fallacy. More specifically Fredrick Jameson (2000) writes,
[the individual subject] is also a myth…this construct [of the subject] is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification which sought to persuade people that they ‘had’ individual subjects and possessed some unique personal identity (p. 285).
The point: we cannot reconstruct an author by reading a text because there is no singular author.
This death of the subject also leads to the death of origin. Derrida (1978):
The “subject” of writing does not exist if we mean by that some sovereign solitude of the author. The subject of writing is a system of relations between strata: the Mystic Pad, the psyche, society…it is not enough to recall that one always writes for someone…. We would search the “public” in vain for the first reader: i.e., the first author of a work. (pp. 226-227 [italics original])
Our search in vain for the first author of a work is a search in vain for the origin of discourse, the origin of writing itself.
Writing’s implications are not wrapped solely in the intention of an author, but reach into the complexities of the transfer of meaning from one person to another—a “system of relations.”
If the subject, the writer, is a system of relations and not a single and sovereign entity, then there can be no distinction between a “true” author and a “false” author, a “writer” and a “blogger.”
It is not enough to say that “most blogs aren’t writing,” or even that “there are some bloggers who are true writers,” because assuming truth and falsity in the question of writing is to misunderstand the enterprise of writing from the ground up (in philosophical terms, to dogmatically privilege either the present or presence).
If writing is something more, blogging is nothing less
The problem with blogging is not that most bloggers are poor writers.
In fact, the problem is not the medium.
The problem is that we have too many things to read, too much content to pour over, that each blog post is skimmed, chewed on for all of 28 seconds, and promptly forgotten for the next piece of content in the stream.
Writers, regardless of their vocation, develop content for their respective audiences.
To be sure, we can never have a fully-developed conversation about writing without talking about audience because they are equally part of the process of writing.
Even though journalists, novelists, reporters, columnist and others may inspire us to boil their ideas down, whether or not the distillation takes place is based on an individual reader’s decision.
Blogging has evolved as another form of writing. And simply because we’ve adapted blogging to fit the real-time internet doesn’t suddenly push it’s content out of the realm of writing.
But isn’t there a certain banality of all blog posts? Sure.
Isn’t the blogosphere over saturated? Getting worse by the day.
Are blogs mostly worthy of our time? For many, probably not.
But blogging writing all the same.
So if we want to give credit
In the end, if we want to give credit to the transfer of meaning the occurs through the process of writing, we give credit to enduring ideas, observations, and philosophies regardless of the medium of their expression.
-Andrew
[A warning: some details of this argument were omitted for the sake of brevity. If you take issue with this, we can discuss at length the metaphysical underpinnings of the following philosophical arguments. I'm on Skype here: wordpost]
Image credit: Andrew* [nez on Flickr]; See original for rights information which may differ from the license of this blog
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Tags: blogging, critical thinking, philosophy, writing
