Sunday, August 06, 2006
Just for the record: I'm a supporter
Don't get me wrong here. My dissertation is not written in order to brand spectacular personal reporting as "self-indulgent scribblings" in any crude negative sense. On the contrary, I've been trying to twist these negative labels and show what good can be achieved through self-indulgent scribbling. And Rasmus Ø. Madsen doesn't do negative branding of the material either. The title of his article, just like the title of my dissertation, is quoting a label, a standard viewpoint, which my work is supposed to challenge.
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Hi Christine,
I read the article about your dissertation in Weekendavisen. Besides being a fan of HST, I am also very interested in the subject "writing where you invest your personality". I was kind of surprised that the article did not mention blogging as the most recent trend in this direction. Do you deal with blogging in your dissertation or du you have any thoughts about this?
As a matter of fact no. I’ve been concentrating on print only, but you are quite right. These reporters celebrate much the same values as bloggers do: participation, an explorative approach, investment of personality, a sense of immediacy and of work-in-progress.
That said, however, a lot of the material that I’ve been studying is long or even booklength texts that do have that old finished quality about them: they are rounded narratives found fit and finished enough to print and this sets a very different standard for immediacy. In some of my more critical readings I hold the reporters responsible for this very circumstance, one is Mads Brügger and his Clown Wars that I’ve discussed in a post below--- (social motives of Bonzo, July 27).
HST would have made an excellent blogger, it seems he did his open-ended freewriting in personal letters in stead. (And obviously along the way he found a whole lot of these letters fit to print :)
While reading the article I counld't help thinking of how interesting it would be if you wrote a few blogposts on private/public-blur on blogs - using you theoretical and rhetorical insights.
Writing that in your personal voice on the blog would surely add a very interesting meta-perspective to it all :-)
Oerh, here's just a plain style thought on the subject, namely that getting personal in public is simply much more of a spectacular gesture in the print media - or at least it can be. In print you still have traditional mainstream journalese as a standard form that you can mock or break away from for effect. Blogs, however, were always supposed to "organize the world's information from the personal perspective" (About Blogger). There's no communication in claiming that MY blog will do that. For a reader or a rhetorical critic the occurence of the first person singular as such is a ridiculuous criterion for identifying 'a personal (or private) blog' whereas it still makes sense (or so I claim) if you're out to identify what is and what isn't personal reporting in print.
Fair point. However... eventhough blogs are defined (by blogger.com and by bloggers throughout the world) as a way of organizing and communicating a personal perspective I find that many critics and people unfamiliar with blogging tend to discard blogs for doing just that - being too personal.
There seems to be something very uncomforting about the whole me-thing - even in the blogosphere... why is it that the personal tends to make us so uncomfortable???
I believe we're feeling uncomfortable because we're being ignored. A single person speaking in his own voice and more or less off the top of his head may simply seem not to be making an effort. Public speakers have always been arguing their (own) cases, but somehow they're supposed to be doing it on behalf of their audience, they must appear humble and interested in their audience's best interests (as in "I'm not a public speaker, but I have an obligation to go ahead and be one anyway...") So when a person is saying: "this is just a thought, and I'm just saying this on my own account..." an instinctive reaction from an audience might be: well, go home and finish your thinking and come back when it's worked through and suitable for public presentation. Choosing the first person perspective seems too easy, a little too convenient and therefore rude to the reader - ?
The fact that rude can do some good is brought up for celebration over at Peter (above)'s blog with a quote by George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
Googling the last of these lines in scare quotes I found it included among 'virtual bumper stickers', and at least one blogger (who seems quite reasonable) has adopted the title personally at http://www.unreasonableman.net/ There are definitely more supporters of obtrusive I's out there.
And that said, I believe that discussions of the private/public-blur - like the recent discussion over at nadjasreflexioner.wordpress.com - benefit from a supply of specific examples.
When and how is a blogger being succesfully personal, private, idiosyncratic, rude in public? What would be a (partly) admirable example --- let's say journalism, borderline journalism or alternatives to journalism. Anyone?
As for the "please don't adress us before you've thought things through" I - being the happy owner of a printmedia myself and definately hailing quality and thoroughly 'massaged' writing - find that the bloggosphere offers a completely different channel for my writing - or rather my dialouge with the rest of the world - and most of all the readers. They're not being ignored - now they finally have a voice on their own - and can participate in creating the ideas.
I'm not saying this is better than print - it's just... different. Different writingprocess, different topics, different elocuency.
And I think - to return to your second question (that of the borders of journalism) that many a professional writer - admittedly including myself untill recently - find it hard to open up to th blogosfere simply because we're trained to only share fairly thought-through thoughts. We don't want to waist anybodys time forcing them to read stuff that hasn't been processed. But frankly - I think that we're in for a major change now. Because from now on the trigger is work in process - rather than processed work :-)
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