Blogs And Blogging: Text and Practice

From: A Companion to digital literary studies

Blogs and Blogging: Text and Practice
By
Aimee Morrison

Aimee Morrison’s “ Blogs and Blogging: text and practice” was my favorite article that I have read so far from the Companion of digital literary studies. I had to plough through the others, reading and re-reading and painfully looking up every reference and word, but, Morrison relieved me of these duties and I was able to read her article with ease. In comparison to the other essays I read I found that it was more comprehensible in particular with Liu’s article which took me hours to get through. She introduces her points and then proceeds to explain them in an understandable way for the reader; I did not find myself drifting off on different subjects like I did with Liu’s article.



In her article she explains the art of Blogging which I found very interesting. Morrison gives the reader a history of the blog as we know it today and describes the Blog in comparison to the web page and made me understand the ‘Blog world’ more. I am new to the blog world so it was helpful and interesting to read about what I was getting myself into, in many ways it made me feel as though I was missing out on this new instrument which was the same way I felt just before I signed up to face book and now I cannot live without it.

One particular point I found interesting was that there was only 23 blogs at one time and the only people who really used them were the computer wizards. These blogs were easy to track but now there is more than 75,000 new blogs everyday which makes this task rather hard. After reading this fact I proceeded to look up on the Internet to see if anyone had actually counted the Blogs and to my surprise there were many websites. This can be linked in with Liu’s article as he argues that we are weary at first about new media but when we get used of it being around we begin to use it more and more, and as we see with the growth of the blogosphere, we eventually welcomed the blog and in 2006 the blog-tracking website was indexing more than 54 million blogs globally. This is a very big leap from 23 blogs. Morrison made me wonder about the points in Alan Liu’s article as I questioned this ‘blogosphere’ as a new media encounter. Will there be a day when we look back and wonder how ever did we survive without the blog? How did people get their message out?
Blogging was just as strange to us as writing was to Plato and silent reading was to Augustine (Liu) and we too treated the blog with suspicion but now its part of everyday life just like writing and silent reading is. The blogosphere is now part of the mainstream media world so the boundaries of these two mediums have crossed or overrun. For example on sky news there is an hourly update of the most researched story on the Internet and more often than not there is a blog by someone or some organization making the news reports. This can be seen with the story that Morrison includes in her article about Julie Powell’s online saga to cook every recipe in Julia Child's seminal Mastering the Art of French cooking in one year. This story is now becoming a movie which again is another media chain the Blog is becoming part of. To me this is very interesting because Liu’s article started to make more sense to me. This new media that he talked about is now not pagan to us and we have accepted it in some shape or form with the help of simple to use software such as CMS which lowered the technical barrier to the Blogger.

Morrison also writes about people now losing their jobs over this new found phenomena and about the various types of Blogs that exist such as the political and personal etc. Although she does mention authority and blogging in literary studies she does not go into it much which is a very interesting topic to pursue for future studies.
Also with the upsurge of blogs, the Internet is now full of opinion and very hard to find fact, Morrison failed to discuss this which is also another interesting subject for further studies.

Morrison explained the Blogosphere very well for me and it made sense of a world that I was not used to. I learnt a lot from her article about what a blog is or is not and what it can do and cannot do. It made me think about blogging more. This article is a good read for both the Blogger and the non blogger.