Johns Hopkins grad student Caleb McDaniel has written a very intriguing and persuasive essay in Common-Place on historical analogues for blogging. McDaniel’s argument makes a strategic move away from writers and toward readers-who-write, a move I have found very helpful in trying to make sense of canon debates as well. Favorite pull-quote of the moment:
And despite our differences from antebellum readers, the central challenge for us, as it was for them, is not how to gain access to an abundance of information, but how to decide what information to acquire and which associations to make. In real terms, bloggers do have access to more information than nineteenth-century readers did, but there is only so much information that any one reader can digest, so the problem for both still becomes what to read and how to read it.
McDaniel’s essay goes a long way toward explaining the blogosphere’s fascination and compelling power for me, although I’d expand its parameters beyond print culture (as I suspect McDaniel would too). It really is an Engelbartian augmentation of a practice as old as civilization itself. The interesting question that follows, for me at least, is whether the difference in degree made possible by high-speed networked computing amounts to a difference in kind as well. I’d argue the answer was yes in the case of the printing press, and that it’s also yes in the case of the Internet. How to understand and constructively use the difference is then the next question.
McDaniel’s essay is available online, for instant scholarly gratification. Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education for the initial story.
Thanks for the kind words and generous links.
When pressed to say what is truly unique about the cyberspace revolution, as opposed to early information and publishing revolutions, I too am ultimately pushed back to the answer of “speed.” I also have a somewhat ironic posture towards my own answer, though, because I’m aware that nineteenth-century people thought that the telegraph represented the “annihilation of space and time.” And although we can see pretty easily what they meant–computer networks, after all, are similar to telegraphs in the sense that they detach time from space–it’s harder to understand how contemporaries made the same exaggerated claims about the death of distance upon the invention of steamships. And before that, upon the invention of clippers, and before that, upon the invention of sails, and so on back in time.
Those earlier reactions to the speed of new technologies at least chastens my own intuitive tendency to be hyperbolic about the rapidity of our own technologies. I agree there’s something different about computers than steamships, but I also agree that specifying what that difference is turns out to be more difficult than one would think.
Again, thanks for the plugs! Glad to discover your blog!