Walking the Wall

A professor I’ve taken a couple of classes with is working on a scholarly project about Blogs as Writerly Spaces and this morning I listened to the presentation he gave at a Computers and Writing conference. There were a couple of things that interested me, one was his pointing out the perhaps misplaced idea of blogging as a genre rather than an activity. He noted that you wouldn’t consider blogging a genre in the same way that you wouldn’t consider the book a genre–they are tools of writing. I find that distinction apt and he’s right that I think the term “blogging” is sometimes used as if it is a genre rather than a writing tool like pencils, then typewriters, then computers were. As a side note, I remember reading an essay by Mark Twain in one of his classes about how much he hated the typewriter–I’ll have to dig it up.

Anyway, the other thing that struck my interest was his comparison to blogging as “side by side play” in the way that very young children don’t play with other children so much as next to other children. In a comment I wondered if that comparison to how children interact before they are more socially capable and before their world is bigger than “me” has any bearing on the type of person who blogs–probably yes in some cases and hopefully no in a lot of cases! But it did start me thinking about whether there really are communities of blogging or just categories of blogging and a comment by another reader merged the idea of feed readers along with that in my mind. I wonder if feed readers have lessened the community feel of blogging. I think for myself that it has in the sense that I used to bookmark blogs I enjoyed reading. I had a lot of them but they were manageable and I made a point to comment a lot. Once I started using a feed reader, it was very easy for my feeds to jump to such a high number that really feeling connected to most of them and commenting was really not feasible. This turns into the “you have 300 new posts” skim fest–or if I’ve been not reading posts for a week or more I end up getting overwhelmed and simply pressing “mark all read”. Do we end up skimming more than reading and commenting less due to feed readers–I think that may be true.

On the other hand there are still many blogs that I feel connected to that I will stop skimming and read once I get to them–but I still read them IN the feed reader and I found that strips away the personality of the blog. Isn’t a large part of the personality of a blog found in the design of it? Most of us put a lot of thought and personality into what our blogs looks like–but then I read posts on a feed reader and never see the actual blog. I think it has the possibility of making the blogs blur together and loose their individuality.

Anyway, just thinking out loud. I think I might need to weed out my feeds and start to read again rather than skim.

NOTE: For those using Google Reader, Sknitty pointed out a new feature called “next” that lets you put a link in your bookmark bar and when you click it it takes you to the next feed in your unread list–it takes you to the actual blog and marks it as read in your list.