Today the Instructional Technology Specialists at my school began a fascinating discussion on blogs and their uses in the academy. What are they for? What do they enable? Are they about vanity or community? Display or communication? Some or all of the above?

My literary training emerged very quickly, and I began to muse aloud about what the experience of blogging is like, for readers and for writers. Is it like a conversation? Is it like reading online journals with the chance to write (comment) in the margins? Is it like writing or reading magazines or newspapers? Is it like putting a message in a bottle, then throwing that bottle into a sea of message-filled bottles?

In short, I was looking for an analogy, hoping for a metaphor or at least a simile that would satisfy my wish for the intuitive “yeah” that one gets when the description fits the thing. My blog is like a red, red rose–or not.

Tonight I watched “Darmok,” one of my favorite episodes from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Without giving too much away (stop reading here if you want to avoid a mild spoiler), I can say that the rich images in the foreign language spoken by the aliens depended on imagination, of course, but they depended even more on a rich set of shared narratives. Out of those compelling stories emerge archetypal moments that have only to be named for communication to take place at a very deep level. Something like an in-joke, but very serious, and everyone is “in.”

So now I’ll frame my question differently. What kind of narrative does blogging evoke? What’s the story the reader inhabits as she reads? What narrative do I enact or evoke as I write? What large narrative offers us some understanding of the new online world?

And what richly imagined moments in this online world will become the archetypal images we will share to help ourselves grasp the next part of the story?