To help provide some historical context for our blogging experiences, check out pioneer blogger Rebecca Blood's short essay
Weblogs: A History and Perspective. Blood traces how various initiatives from 1998-2000 coalesced into the cultural form that we now recognize as "blog."
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One section of Rebecca Blood’s article on blogging discusses the paradox of the simultaneous increase and decrease of reflexivity among those who blog. She describes blogging (by virtue of the medium) as involving a greater focus on self-expression, resulting in both greater self-trust and greater impatience with the opinions of one’s peers. This made me think about the phenomenon of communication without the immediate (and visceral) feedback of our relevant peers—would you write things in a blog that you wouldn’t say to the classmate sitting next to you, to your boss, or to your parents? (I often forget that I “friended” my Mom on facebook.—side note) What kinds of social control or norming mechanisms exist in digital communication?
Total aside: Another interesting (to me) development in blogging is news blogging (example below), where a journalist might follow an upcoming election and talk about their experience of sitting in the press booth, sleeping on the airplane and listening to such and such person speak. There was one I really got into during the Obama election 4 years ago. Lately some have switched to an almost twitter-esque format, with 400 character limit updates every few minutes. I wonder, how is the digital format and increased personalization/self-expression of blogging changing news reporting? Has anyone else got into reading these blogs? What do you think?
blogs.wsj.com