Blog genres
The blog “waggish” has posted “Genre: Thoughts on blogs and genres” and concludes:
Blogs are not content-focused, in that the content rolls by too quickly to be lasting. (Yes, they provide content, but when it’s so subject to being missed or disorganized, the structural integrity of the content is not the focus.) But nor are they personality-focused. If Josh Marshall started writing exclusively about Andrei Tarkovsky tomorrow, he would lose much of his audience, who would nonetheless stick with Kevin Drum. Not to say that they’re the same, but they are not unique in the way that novelists are. They can be replaced.
Blogs, then, are topic-focused. (And by topic I effectively mean the definable gestalt of the blog.) Individual content matters less in a blog than sticking to a consistent topic over time. And this is where the analogy to 30s romantic comedy seems apropos; these movies too stuck to a remarkably consistent topic, and the individual variations were practically indistinct. To put it another way, it was up to the individual to distinguish what variations they preferred, because the level of homogeneity was so high. And so it is with any given blog, or even with a blog genre. The difference is that the medium makes it that much more difficult to ever separate out individual works for praise, and so the gestalt is left to stand on its own. In the 30s, people could see one movie and remember it well, whether it was good or bad. In the medium of blogs, that’s not really possible; you absorb an entire gestalt as you consume them.
This produces two diverging effects: either people get lost in the mass of repetitive, homogenous content and process what they happen to run into, or they abstract quite heavily to synthesize large amounts of data into a graspable gestalt. Sort of like reading Balzac.
What do you think?
Note that waggish has two more posts on blogs: Thoughts on genre: Blogs and improvization and Thoughts on genre: Blogs and practice.
