Blogging as literature exactly

In working through this thesis I have stumbled upon something interesting, well many interesting things but for this post I have one in particular. I have realized through correcting typos of my own as well as managing incoming comments that in the end, despite all the social software advantages of blogs, they can be used to create exact digital replicas of books. Each post or rather each category can be used as chapters while the blog itself can be designed to simply maintain the internet publication of the book rather than physically publishing it.

 

 

 

Yes blogs have all these extra abilities but with most sites, those extra abilities are regulated through the blogger. Thus if one so chooses, a blog can be no different than a book and operate in exactly the same way.

 

 

 

This may seem simple and obvious to some but it does provide something important in the continued pursuit of mapping the blog; as a potentially different medium, it can be exactly the same.

 

 

Thoughts?

 

 

Huysmans

Collaborative Writing

In doing research for this thesis I have begun to think about what specific aspects of blogs are having larger influences on writing and writers. For example by using blogs to publish one’s work, the feedback received can be incorporated into the next installment, thus you have a continually evolving story that is as much shaped by the responding bloggers as by the writer. But it doesn’t end there, that is an aspect of literature that existed since the literary magazine, what is new about this is its instantaneous communication. The writer receives those comments immediately following their release on the blog. The collaboration becomes much more attractive as a means to creation and the process infinitely easier.

 

I myself am still lacking in entering an online blogging community, but I think the reason for that is I haven’t figured out the best approach. However as a member of such a community, one can learn and communicate with others’ submissions, instead of just commenting on the writing, a respondent can add to it and expand it with the writer. What started in surrealism as the creation of works of art that were done through collaboration and could not be done otherwise appears here.

 

There is more though about blogging. Blogging started as an online diary, a journal one could add to as many times a day as one wanted and could add as much content as desired. Blogs are not tied to literature alone, but they are also not visual poetry or digital art. Blogs are unique.

 

In looking at how to place blogs in the spectrum of literature I have found three aspects worth dividing this thesis into. First is the artistic aspects of a blog, how it is neither strictly literature nor is it some form of visual art, it is its own medium. Second would be the literary community formed around blogs, how blogs are affecting the journalism of book reviews and the blogs that have responded to the decrease in such reviews. The last section will focus on the change in publication. Can these blogs weaken the hold of big time publishers? That is a question I don’t think can be answer now but should none the less be posed.