Murray Adcock. (theadhocracy.co.uk)I am a big fan of categorisation debates, so the concept of trying to define what a “blog” is (or isn’t) piqued my interest.
Further exploring what makes a blog a blog — which I agree I haven’t quite landed on yet:
The fact that blogs take the form of a building argument, not necessarily voicing their intent or conclusion immediately, but instead guiding the reader through the narrative to naturally arrive at that conclusion. I agree wholeheartedly with this take, but I’m not sure that this is the essence of “blog-ness”. I think that’s just how people actually talk when given a platform.
(Emphasis mine.)
This connects back to the democratization of self-publishing, leading to greater influence of oral culture (as you point out).
The word “given” here got me thinking — like the soapbox example, blogging is when people create and claim a platform for themselves. The work is self-motivated. No one’s telling us what to blog about. It’s not fulfilling an assignment. The things people blog about are the things they care about enough to spend their free time considering.
And because it’s not “for a purpose,” because it’s self-directed, a blog post needn’t fit a formal format. A lot of blogging really is ‘talking through ideas’ in text, in real time — the thinking and writing happen together. (Or at least it is for me, though I’m sure it’s not the universal blogging experience 😉) Even when a post is edited before publishing to center a specific conclusion reached through the drafting, a tenor of curious exploration or earnest passion often carries through.
That’s part of what makes a lot of content marketing so vapid and noxious: not only is it hollow of meaning, but it’s uninteresting signalling barely disguised as thought. It’s the writer regurgitating what they believe other people want to read about, or what they think will make them sound smart or good or clever. (Not that self-motivated blogging doesn’t have some measure of this, as all public writing does, but blog posts generally don’t feel calculated and perfunctory the way many churn pieces do.)
Blogs tend to be personal spaces (or places attempting to make themselves appear personal, as with brand/ business blogs) that give a person or persons a platform, but one which they want others to consider.
(Emphasis mine.)
This makes me think of imitation bees: the corporate blog tries to pass itself off as a Real Blog by looking like one at first glance, then once you start reading you suspect ‘someone’s been hired to write this’… A lack of feeling, an unwillingness to voice opinions, an empty ‘we’, a cautious and bland tone, become apparent when writers produce for a brand that wants to gain the SEO benefits of a blog without risking expressing any personality. They want to give the appearance of sharing knowledge and participating in community and conversation, but those are positive externalities to their goals of drawing traffic, building reputation, and ultimately selling widgets. I wonder whether I’m being too inclusive in accepting everything that claims to be a blog as a blog…
10 replies on “Blogs are a platform for normal people”
As we in the IndieWeb promote personal websites and encourage more people to write and publish online, and nostalgia for blogs and RSS is high, it’s useful to hone in on what exactly we’re talking about when we say blog.* Because, despite being a form of writing for more than 20 years, blogging is surprisingly hard to pin down.**
There are just a few truly defining characteristics of a blog:
Content is published in the form of posts, typically presented in reverse chronological order
Content is posted on a website, online, with hypertextual capabilities
Blogs are “self-published,” regardless of hosting platform, in that there is no gatekeeper authorizing publication
And yet, I think what makes a blog a blog is more than these technicalities; what makes a book a book is not merely “prose text, more than 50,000 words in length, on a single thesis or theme, collected in a single volume.” Printing off a long blog and binding it together does not necessarily a book make; for one, books are weighted towards linear reading — start to finish — while blog posts do not have to be read in the order they were originally published.
There are elements of bookness that make us say, this is a book. So what is blogness? From one of the many ‘yay let’s blog again’ posts everyone’s blogging about right now (which I enjoy), I wound up on a 2003 post trying to define what a blog is — but it addresses mainly the technical elements and the structure of the content. Blogging as a medium evolved out of the combination of technology and tools used; here, I’m interested in digging into how the writing and format are different from other mediums.
I’m a fan of graphic novels, and consider them a different medium than prose books; it pisses me off that graphic novels and graphic non-fiction are shelved with the comic strips at my library under 741.5. So I wonder: are blogs a distinct enough format to be their own top-level medium, or are they simply a hypertextual version of essay collections or newspapers?*** Where would you shelve blogs in the library: do they get mixed in with the books by topic, do they get their own call number as graphic novels do, are they thrown in with the periodicals, or do they go in their own section? @DavidShanske I’m sure you have an opinion here 😉
*So I feel a little goofy writing about what blogging is in 2023. But it’s Saturday night Sunday afternoon (lol), and I possess a blog, so here we are. Sorry not sorry.
FYI, I wasn’t paying attention to The Blog Discourse back in the 2000s. This isn’t academic work, so I’m not going to try to go back and read twenty years of other peoples’ commentary and analysis I missed — in classic blogger mode, I am doing zero research and opinion-dumping 😎 Feel free to point me to good examples if someone covered this ground ages ago!
**I’m also thinking about categorization because I just watched a video about how barnacles defied classification and Darwin spent eight years cursing their nature as he tried to figure out what they were, if not a mollusk.
***This is my wee knockoff of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, but for blogs 😅 If you haven’t read it, correct that stat.
What distinguishes the blog as a medium?
Blogs arose from a particular technological foundation, but I posit the technology alone does not fully encompass what a blog is. As a distinct format, they are worthy of consideration, because the medium a message is served through is as important as the message itself.
What doesn’t define blogging
Blogging is so broad that it seems mainly to be defined by example. I know when I’m reading a blog because it feels like a blog — but what is it about the writing that gives me that feeling? Many of the categorizations we might use to clarify blogging don’t universally apply:
Blogs are often personal and written in first person, but can be fully anonymous
Blogs can be written by amateurs or experts
Blogs can be written in a conversational or formal style
Blogs can be published by individuals or organizations
Blog posts range in length from a handful to thousands of words, encompassing both short and long-form articles
Blogs can be authored by a single person or multiple authors
Blogs can be purely text or primarily photos or links
Blogs can be single- or multi- topic
Blogs can be published indefinitely or for a fixed duration
Blogs can be monetized or ad-free
Blogs can be run by an editorial team or an individual
Blogs can be private or available to the browsing public
Blogs can be standalone or part of a larger website
Technology enables but does not solely define blogness
The technological elements shape the medium, giving blogs the characteristics that make them distinct from other formats:
Composed of addressable, distinct posts: each post can be found online, referenced and responded to individually (sometimes on the website as native comments, but otherwise from other websites and blogs)
Order-irrelevant and non-hierarchical: each individual post may serve as an entry point to the entire blog because visitors can land upon articles published at any time, current or long past, and all posts are part of the same feed, not organized beneath “higher level” posts
Impermanent and ever-evolving: the blog as a whole changes as posts are added, removed, or revised, and links and images break
Self- and external- referencing: hypertextual capabilities encourage authors to supplement their text with links to their own work, forming networks of connected thought, and to references on other websites and online resources
As a self-published work, a blog reflects the author(s)’s or editor(s)’s premise unfiltered. This direct, decentralized form of publication democratizes writing and the sharing of ideas. As more people of all backgrounds participate in the blogosphere, the culture of blogging accepts less formal, more conversational writing styles. While blogging is of literate culture, it also draws on aspects of oral culture.*
Publishing online is an essential characteristic of blogs, influencing how readers interact with them and how writers can expect them to be consumed. Because each post is distinct and can be read and searched individually, bloggers cannot assume their audience is familiar with their previous work, nor their style; bloggers do not know who reads their work. Those factors inform the style of writing and approach to argument.
The capability of posting multiple types of content in the same stream is also a vital part of communicating with blogs. Like the interplay of image and text in graphic novels combines to form meaning in a unique way for the comic media, in blogging, different types of entries compose a whole. Different embedded media types within the medium of the blog — text, videos, songs, and more — together can tell a different story than being constrained to a single format would allow. Whether a particular blog makes use of multiple post types is less important than that those storytelling tools were available and the author chose not to use them.
*It has been way too long since I read Orality and Literacy to explore this more but it’s probably important. Help me out here 😉
How blogs differ from other forms of online writing
Newsletters
Newsletters are not just emailed blogs. They are blog-adjacent, sharing many of the same qualities, but their unsearchability, non-addressable nature, lack of public publishing, and direct transmission to subscribers gives writers a wholly different framework. Newsletter-runners can know their audience — they can access the database of their subscribers. Some issues may be forwarded to non-subscribers, but newsletter authors can primarily address a core, knowable audience. Interactions with their audience most likely take place one-to-one, in private, through email replies.
The context of reading a blog — a compilation of posts on the blog’s theme, or viewed as individual posts that occupy the entire window — is quite different from the reader’s experience of reading email newsletters. While an email is also viewed singly — in the frame of the email client — once opened, it is disconnected from the author’s previous work. Links are opened in separate software, disrupting the experience.
Emails are also more ephemeral; while it’s possible for readers to save them in their email inbox, more likely they are deleted after being read. Because older content is pushed down in a reader’s inbox, emails are most likely to be read soon after they are received; that also encourages writers to write time-sensitive information.
The technological underpinnings of newsletters enable the author to directly address the reader using insertable name fields from the subscriber database. This affordance fosters a sense of intimacy by likening the format to letters. Between the encouraged intimacy, presumption of a closed audience, and temporal transience, newsletter authors may be more willing to be vulnerable in what they discuss and share.
Social media
Likewise, an aggregate of social media posts does not become a blog. On social media, each post is viewed as part of a mixed feed with posts by other authors, the content stripped of its contextual connection to the original author. While authors can know their audience to an extent, on social media platforms the algorithm also incentivizes the work creators post by influencing the reach of an author’s work beyond (and even within) their “known” audience.
The platforms reinforce a strong bias to the present. Individual posts, especially older material, are hard to find and access. Responses are public and often immediate, encouraging bursty conversations rather than lengthy exchanges. The immediacy of the feed encourages replies in the moment, while a blog post can be saved and mulled over for later engagement. Social media is oral culture.
A blog forms an accretive, holistic argument
While the tone and style of a blog post is not constrained, I wonder if the approach to argument itself helps define blogging. A characteristic I’ve noticed of many blog articles is that they are not structured in the traditional Western essay format: they don’t state a thesis at the beginning.* Often, they are explorations on a theme, or build an argument as they go, only reaching a conclusion at the end.**
And if you zoom out from the individual blog post level, in a sense this also describes what blogs are: a contemplation on a particular theme in depth (even if that theme is “the author’s life” or “stuff I like”). A blog is a body of work. Blogs are composed of many posts, which stand individually and can be read in any order, and which collectively form a blog that tells a story from all of its individual posts. Unlike a book, blogs grow and shift for as long as they are online, each added post changing the blog incrementally.
*I once heard this approach to essay writing is more common in Eastern cultures but citation needed 🤷♀️
**Even here, I didn’t really clue you in on my thinking at the beginning of this post — I brought you to it along with my thought process of first identifying what does not define a blog.
What is the future of the blog medium?
I was chatting with a friend recently about the awkwardness of the writing in my 2004 blog — aside from being a teenager, it was the first time I was really writing in public and I didn’t feel comfortable in my voice — but I also wonder: maybe part of the awkwardness is that no one really knew how to write online yet? The culture of online self-publishing was still developing — is still developing. At only twenty years old, blogging is frankly still a new medium.
How do we want blogging as a medium to mature over the next twenty years?
EDIT: Further thoughts on the essence of blogs prompted by Murray Adcock’s response:
Also posted on IndieNews
Tracy Durnell last month wrote up a thing trying to understand blogs, as in trying “to hone in on what exactly we’re talking about” when we talk about them or use the term. I just want to hit a couple of points here.
(Once again, I need to develop a workflow wherein I capture where I find certain links, especially blog posts. There’s nowhere in the Share Sheet action saving to Instapaper to include a note.)
I’m not entirely sure I agree here. As a popular/mainstream sort of thing, “online self-publishing” still might have been coming into its own in 2004 but even just “posting to the web” at that point was like eight-years-old. Prior to that, there were Usenet newsgroups, textfiles, and Bulletin Board Systems.
In a followup prompted by a response to the original, Durnell bears down on something that I think comes up a lot when this subject comes around.
As I said last December, what she refers to as “self-motivated” I deemed “self-solicited”. One of the things that differentiates, to my mind, blogging from social media is that “bloggers almost always are writing because they can’t not” whereas social “constantly demands to be fed either by attention or production […] even in the absence of a legitimate internal need”.
(She perhaps should be glad that she “wasn’t paying attention to The Blog Discourse back in the 2000s”, because it means she missed all the “A-list” drama.)
Durnell in her first piece notes that “in classic blogger mode, I am doing zero research and opinion-dumping” and asks for pointers “to good examples if someone covered this ground ages ago”.
My go-to for this sort of thing always has been Rebecca Blood, since she literally wrote the book (and edited a second) and her website still has a helpful list of her early writings on the subject—including Q&As with other bloggers of the era.
Source: bix.blog
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