Rettberg Chapter 2: Historical Perspective
Reading Blogging by Jill Walker Rettberg again. This time moving on to the second chapter, which attempts to put blogging into the overall story of communication in general. Let’s try using headings this time.
Mass Media
I really liked this chapter. I started to think about the term “mass media.” It seems to have a rather negative connotation now, but it also means tons of people can get information. I think there comes to be two ways of looking at it. Mass media is either media designed for the masses by a few people, or it is just media that can be distributed to the masses. In that way, I suppose you can look at blogging as a mass media. Almost anyone can access that information, and hey if they don’t like it they can turn around and complain. Sure just because anyone can see it doesn’t mean they will on something as huge as the Internet, but the fact is it’s still there in the open.
Bringing up the days of a few people putting together small print pamphlets got me thinking as well. I think there are a lot of parallels to blogging that can be made with that. Such small publications were a key part of early American politics. When I actually started to think about it, some of that writing that I’ve seen does really echo what you see in the world of blogging today. That highly opinionated and personal style is what characterizes a lot of political blogging for me.
Argument, Conversation, and Writing
Of course people have always argued, but I also wonder how well we are arguing now. Rettberg also discusses how text is unable to explain itself. Blogging and other forms of Internet communication do give us that ability to have back and forth discussions on what would otherwise be a static article, but I wonder sometimes if we’re actually able to take full advantage of that. She discusses how it goes back to oral communication and a larger sense of community, but I’m not convinced it’s quite the same. There is a lack of immediacy that I’m not sure we’re quite used to dealing with yet. It takes more effort to type a question than to ask one, and people are naturally lazy. I’ve seen time and time again on the Internet that people often find it easier to just assume whatever they want about your text, and, ironically, expend far more energy firing back a lengthy rant about how you are stupid.
It’s a somewhat interesting thought, because I have often felt highly stressed by using the written word to communicate with people. I worry about the permanence of it, the lack of being able to clarify a point. There is a certain in-elasticity to it. You can’t react on the fly to the facial expressions or objections of another person. Fitting these ideas into an academic context, I recall an Honors class final exam that consisted of having face to face conversations with people, and then writing down a summary of what happened. Another Honors class consisted almost entirely of conversation about such wide-ranging subjects as the nature of free will to economics. It’s not the same as writing a paper or giving a presentation, and I think that gives a lot of good perspective for me on what Rettberg was talking about.
Mindset of Print
She also discusses a change from a world where there is one authoritative text distributed to the masses. What she calls the mindset of print. The advantages of this are huge, and I think she did a good job laying out how blogging gives more people a say, but it also gives me pause. Sometimes I fear that we can easily become too isolated in our own little bubble worlds, only listening to what we want to hear. If there is no authoritative text of Romeo and Juliet, say, if someone only read the ‘happy ending’ version, how can they even have a conversation about it?
I guess my thought is that it has to be an extension, rather than a replacement. I think it’s good to have a base line from which we can draw to share with a huge variety of people. A movie like Avatar, for example, is something you can talk to almost anyone about, because everyone has seen it. Still, I like that the Internet allows us to hook up with people that share our more specialized interests, because there’s nothing as satisfying as finding someone else that has seen that super obscure film you like so much. I just wonder if removing the idea of “authoritative text” entirely once again moves us towards that idea of living in a very specific bubble or niche. It’s important that this ability is freeing, rather than confining.
Oh boy, next is social networking.
Tags: #en3177, blogging, history, rettberg
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