Can Blogs Be Taken Seriously
Galle photo by Seemster
Read a post critical of the blogging panel in Galle and I’d have to say, in many ways, that I agree. The panel was too short, machangy, and didn’t stick to the topic. It was, however, a first outing and I think it went OK. To address those concerns, however, this is what I think of the topic – Can Blogging Be Taken Seriously? Globally, yes; but in the sense that I can tell my achchi it’s what I do, no. As an angle for debate I think you can break serious down into 1) Is it serious in some abstract sense 2) Is it serious in that people take it seriously and 3) is it as serious as ‘literature’. On the abstract level I think blogging is as serious as any form of language. Any communication can be serious (or not). I don’t think there is a medium that has the power to make words inherently silly. Shakespeare on toilet paper is still Shakespeare. On the social level, people globally do take blogs seriously. Every US politician running for President has one (since Howard Dean), many companies (Sun, Google) have and they are covered (sometimes fawningly) in the mainstream media. Blogs have also had a huge impact during inherently serious times (tsunami, Burmese insurrection). Serious also involves money, and I know of many full-time bloggers in the US and abroad. Now is blogging as serious as ‘literature’? That’s a tough one.
What Is Literature
Frankly, I don’t know. My definition would be books, preferably heavy. The Wikipedia definition is
Literature is a body of (usually) written works related by subject-matter, by language or place of origin, or by dominant cultural standards. Literally translated, the word means “acquaintance with letters” (from Latin littera letter). In Western culture the most basic literary types include poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.
By that very loose definition, blogs are obviously literature, though not necessarily serious. Blogs are defined by subject matter, language, place and they have their own set of cultural standards. And they obviously use letters. I was looking through the definition moreso and I also found a sub of literature called ‘essay‘, which seems to cover blogs pretty well.
An essay is a piece of writing, usually from an author’s personal point of view. Essays are non-fictional but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.
…
Notable essayists are legion. They include Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John D’Agata, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
Do I think those are serious people and that their writings were serious? Yes. So are essayists serious? IMHO, yes. Are blogs essays? Yes. I don’t see any meaningful reason to exclude them from that category. It’s like saying that rap isn’t poetry. There may be cultural, social and class reasons not to attach that label, but for an impartial alien observer, rap is rhyming words (and most poems are historically oral anyways) and blogs are personal narratives. So I would posit that blogs are a form of essay. Does that make them necessarily serious? No.
Serious
Serious is kinda a bullshit word. Serious as what? Serious as cancer? Does serious mean boring? Respectable? Respectable to who? As a benchmark, being a literary festival, I guess we can take books. Of the people there, prolly the most serious writers were Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple. I spelt that wrong, eh. And Simon Winchester. By serious I mean the unit of the sets [people that write large books] and [people I know]. Now, reading a book like these guyses is an inherently different experience than reading a blog post. The only way I could describe it is that it is much more high resolution.
I work mainly in print now, and the main gap I see between the net and old media is resolution. I think Innis would classify this as ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ media. Loosely, heavy media (like stone) moves slowly through space, but moves very well through time. Light media (like papyrus, speech, paper) moves fast through space but disappears through time. Now the spectrum has shifted and I think that books can be classed as heavy media (in comparison to electronic). Heavy and Light are also equivalent to ‘Time-Biased’ and ‘Space-Biased’. Hence is topic, the Bias Of Communications.
Anyways, old media (like print) is Time-Biased in that you sit with it for a while, and you get a very rich experience. Vikram Seth’s book ‘A Suitable Boy’ is a brick with like three generations of Indians stuffed in there. If you read it you emerge feeling like you know a whole extended family. Dalrymple’s stuff is extensively interviewed, researched, and you find stuff in there that you can’t find on a casual Google. There is a weight to the work.
A blog post, however, is Space-Biased in that it can be read almost anywhere (unlike a book) and is communicated almost instantly (no print time), but it does have less weight. You can read the blogs of Indian people, but it does not have the same depth and inticrate structure of ‘A Suitable Boy’. Plus, most people scan, skip and hop around blog posts, so you never get that coherent, controlled experience. Blog posts are a mile wide, but an inch deep.
I think Innis’s terms are a useful way of thinking of any new media, btw. Low resolution images on the web can be accessed fast, but there is still a heavy wonder to high resolution prints and art. MP3s can be mailed around and transported in pockets, but hearing a vinyl record on vacuum tubes (or a live concert) is still aurally mind-blowing. Light/heavy, light/heavy.
Now, along those lines, I can comfortably say that Blogs are a ‘light’ medium whereas books are ‘heavy’. I mean, literally. Does this mean that low-res blogs are a bit less serious than books? If you equate ‘serious’ with ‘heavy’, then yes. If you define serious in terms of communicating human pathos and experience, then no. Essays (which I think blogs are) can be deathly serious. Meh. I haven’t written anything like that in a while. Feels like taking a satisfying dump. And that last sentence, perhaps, is why blogs aren’t serious at all.
This is highly dubious. Miss Travel is a travel/social networking site that connects ‘Generous’ and ‘Attractive’ travelers. To, like, travel together, I guess. It all seems a bit like arranged prostitution and trafficking. This is part of a broader online trend to connect rich men to younger, attractive women. Sites like 
Sri Lankan domestics never say anything, they just stop coming. My maid just stopped coming and when I finally pressed her she said I needed to get a washing machine. I was hoping to ride this one out, but I’ve run out of underwear and I have no choice. I finally caved and bought a washing machine, from 
There’s nothing wrong with pornography, but there’s a lot wrong with porn. Nothing wrong with watching people have sex, but too often that sex is brutal, senseless and coerced. I mean how many couples are coming on each others faces every day? Hence, philosopher king Alain de Botton – after calling for a 
Sri Lanka is going to start offer 
[...] Can Blogs Be Taken Seriously Posted by Sanjana Hattotuwa Filed in ICT in general Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Galle Literary Festival, GLF, Groundviews, Lakbima, literature, Rajpal Abeynaike, Sri Lanka, Sri Lankan blogosphere [...]
The day I took my blog seriously is the day I quit blogging.
The power in blogging, and I don’t need to tell any of you this, is that it is NOT serious.
The power of the Internet lies in the fact that it’s informal. Rather than sticking to the norms of the structured world, it explores the infinite freedom which lies beyond crappy social stereotypes and social hierarchies.
It gives power to the individual. It gives power to the amateur. That’s why it’s so much better, juicier and down-to-earth than mainstream media. You hear the voices of the people, rather than the salespeople who are trying to sell their products. It’s consumer sovereignty in it’s finest form.
It’s hilarious that you bunch of people are trying to equate blogging to mainstream media.
What is it with you people? Are you getting old?
A friend of mine forwarded this blog post to me and it really cracks me up. I suppose it has something to do with what you are on about http://kottu-kottu.blogspot.com
I think the whole question is quite silly. Blogs, News Papers, Books or Gossips, all are content in deferent containers and packages for deferent market segments. A religious person may take his holy book as the only serious content in the world, while dismissing Shakespeare as some sort of garbage and wanting to kill other book readers. But at the same time, some may take all those “serious religious booksâ€, as utter bullshit. It is all about the content and the audience, not about the package. Comparing Blogs with Books is nothing more than comparing tomatoes with potatoes.
I think a reinterpretation of the question would be “Are Blogs Mainstream?” Both tomatoes and potatoes definitely are.
content in blogs can be taken seriously if proper citations or reasonable proof can be given…
or else it becomes a rant or just an expression of the blogger or gossip…
oxford defn
literature
noun
1 written works, esp. those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit
2 the production or profession of writing
i dont see why content in blogs cant satisfy the above definition
if someone printed content off a blog and published a book…
would you call it literature? like…
would you call election manifestos literature?
would you take such literature seriously?
:)
More than one blog has moved into mainstream publishing. The one that come most readily to mind is belle de jour
(see link here
Telegraph
and
Belle De Jour
You can search for the original blog – I’m not sure if its still active.
There was another recently but I cant seem to remember the name.
Blogs do have the weakness of lacking editorial oversight and possibly the public identity and therefore the responsibility/accountability that goes with mainstream media but some undoubtedly are influential.
There is also cross-polination from mainstream media. Paul Krugman (who has made his name as an economist/journalist) writes a blog and a number of newspapers including the Economist are allowing some of their columnists to write semi-authorised blogs – see this for example:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/
The format of the blog allows for spontaneous, opiniated pieces which have their place and which is probably what mainstream media is trying to capture.
The medium is still in a very early stage of evolution and we have to see how it develops.
Just got the name of the other blogger who recently published a book:
Girl With One Track Mind
read her story here:
MY FAREWELL NOTE TO BLOGGING (written July 2007)
I never called myself a blogger. I wasn’t.
I only did a sojourn to blogsphere and leaving too early because I realised overstay is not healthy.
Not that blogging is wrong. I identify the potential, power and nature of it than anyone else (see below) – perhaps that per se makes enough reason to quit. (Anyway, it has never been my bread and butter. Should I care?)
I have learnt some of the tricks and rules of the game quickly and some of my observations/axioms are below. (not all obvious today) I was testing some at the time of departure. Have no use of them any more. If they can be any use please feel free to do whatever. No copyrights.
(Please note I use the term ‘blogging’ in the absence anything better. I mean the larger phenomenon that is called by different names including blogging, citizen journalism, web 2.0 etc. None of these terms suffice and I expect a better term soon. Also it is not limited to PCs. Forget even mobiles. Soon you will find housewives doing ‘microwave oven blogging’ or motorists, ‘car blogging’)
1) There are few human activities as intricate and multifaceted as blogging, one being communication itself. (The two ‘concepts’ will converge by not later than 2050, but not in the way we think) Most of the adjectives we use today for God (omnipresent, omnipotent…) will be valid for blogging (taken collectively) before long. To rephrase what Clarke said, the only way to discover the limits of the possibilities of blogging is to go beyond them into the impossible – which is light years away. We are still in infancy.
2) Why someone blogs? This is one of the most difficult questions ever. Number of answers is infinite. Not different to asking why one communicates. (Why do some journalists/consultants/authours who never move a mussel except for the right price, ‘waste’ so many non billable hours writing stuff sometimes for an extremely limited audience of few hundreds?)
3) Like Thomas Friedman, I too sense the phenomenon of the flattening of power. (Read: The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century). Power will shift from its traditional bases to flat lands, like lava flowing from volcanoes. Blogging will be a tool that makes this possible.
4) Blogging vs. traditional media debate is useless. To meet the challenges of the day, both these streams will eventually evolve to a level that no demarcation is possible or necessary. (say before 2030)
5) Anonymity, one of the most important aspects of blogging is not digital but analogue. It is not 0 or 1 but quantifiable to something in between like 0.445 etc.(eg. ‘Voice in Delhi’ does not have a zero anonymity. His/her identity is known to a set of people, can be guessed with a certain degree by a second set, has a certain degree of possibility to be actually an individual from Delhi, can be traced by the times of blogging, IP numbers, by his comments and comments of others. Each of these factors decreases the anonymity from 1 downwards.)
6) If Anonymity = A, the scope of an anonymous blogger S = C1/(1-A) + C2 (C1 and C2 are constants depending upon the society – real and virtual the blogger operates in.) This means if A=1 or the blogger is fully anonymous, he/she can publish whatever he/she wants. (filth, insults, porn, you name it…) However, as explained in (5) A cannot be zero.
7) Blogging is blogging. There is nothing called good blogging and bad blogging. These are subjective terms coined for ones own convenience. Any ‘unethical’ nature of a blog will be taken care by the ‘market’. One cannot sell rotten tomatoes for long, even if unregulated. Still – if one can sell rotten tomatoes it proves there is a market for it. (not to eat – may be to hit a speaker) It is pure demand supply theory. So this very nature of this market makes terms like censorship, defamation, mud slinging, quality control etc irrelevant. (Assumption: Parents make Internet access decisions for their children)
8) Is blogging a personal thing? Should others (family/ employer/ state) have a control over one’s blog? No simple answers. A very complicated formula, depending upon a blog’s content, objective, audience, degree of anonymity etc.
9) Should blogs be regulated/censored by state? Let me put it this way. It will be more economical, more democratic, more logical and more beneficial the society at large, if the blogs (=Internet) are left untouched by the state in the long term – even if a certain anonymous blogger starts teaching how to make claymore mines at home. (Assumption: Parents make Internet access decisions for their children)
10) Can we live without blogs? Question rarely arises. We cannot live without air, but we never bother to see we get enough. If the question is rephrased to whether we can live without blogging, (active contribution) well I am not sure. Even if one loads an image for flickr, for video for YouTube it is blogging. Sharing a mail (like this one) is also blogging. So I do not know.
[...] discuss the topic, “Bloggers: Can they be taken seriously?”. There were six panelists: Indi, Sanjana Hatthotuwa, Iresha Dilhani from Mahavillachchiya, Deepika Shetty, Nazreen Sansoni [...]