1. Lindon Parker on October 30, 2003 1:16 AM writes...

I'm wondering about this and some of Clay's writing on Power-Laws and blogs. There seems to be an underlying preception(unstated) of what "success" would be for blogging as an activity. To para-phrase a comment about science-fiction "so 90% of blogging is rubbish, but 90% of EVERYTHING is rubbish".

What is the definition of success for blogging, is it to just keep happening, but at what level?(is usenet's current level of usage considered failure?) Maybe it's a kind of glacial or subliminal(hard to measure) success in the "redefineing" of social strutures or interactions or attitudes? After all how do we define the success of the telephone other than by usage?

2. Tom Coates on October 30, 2003 3:21 AM writes...

Yes - I think weblogging almost completely fails at the moment if your criteria for success are that it should be a literary medium that creates large-scale mainstream celebrities. But then again, when was the last time someone seriously questioned why we haven't seen any significant artists emerging out of "e-mail"? Weblogging - for a large number of people at least - isn't the same practice as writing long elegant top-and-tailed popular pieces in a columnar style. I find arguments like Paglia's immensely frustrating - hundreds of thousands of people find value in writing weblogs at a micro-level, millions if you believe some estimates. Similar levels of people get value out of the weblogs that they read. Are we really so banal as a culure (and by that I mean Western societies rather than webloggers) that we can't see the value in that without it being sanctified by celebrity?

3. Alexander Knorr on October 30, 2003 5:13 AM writes...

All this reminded me of Chris Kelty's article Free Software/Free Science, wherein he describes an analogy between the open source culture and academia by scrutinizing the aspects of credit and reputation. While doing scientific work it may sometimes getting frustrating to have to enter the 'game' of credit, reputation and citations, to have to get through a plethora of library catalogues, articles and books, but that's the way it works -- sometimes very fruitful -- and nobody is 'condemned' to take part in it, just as nobody is 'condemned' to read blogs.

Paglia draws a parallel between blogs and a library; the latter she denigratingly describes as a musty cellar. There indeed were times when I was completely fed up with libraries as I had to sift through large quantities of scientific articles and found out that only a fraction of them had some value for my own work. But that cannot be an argument for giving an order to the library to throw away all the stuff, and only retain the items which are of interest to me. Or even to forbid other scientists to write on subjects which don't touch my interests. It was my own personal free choice to do scientific work, and I couldn't do it at all if there weren't libraries which store and preserve all kinds of writings. It's a banal fact that the overwhelming majority of texts stored in libraries are of no interest to me, some I personally may even consider to be rubbish -- but whenever I turned around while standing in front of the shelves, I never discovered someone standing behind me, putting a gun against my head and forcing me to read every page of every book. Again it's my perfect free choice, what to read. And this freedom is in part guaranteed by the circumstance, that the libraries store nearly everything written. With blogs it's the same -- we already had that issue in the discussion on democracy and the blogosphere.

Drastically said: If Paglia is against the bloggers' right of self-determination, against their free choice on what to write, she's against libraries and favors censorship. And that's the end of culture (and science) in the occidental sense.

Another thing: Not only the web has "dealt a fatal blow to the culture of stardom", but television and the print-media have, too. The time of everybody's ten minutes of fame, prophesized by Andy Warhol, has come. But that does not at all mean that the 'culture of stardom' is injured or starts to vanish. It just isn't the same anymore, what it was in the times of Fatty Arbuckle. But that's the way with cultures, they aren't homogenous rigid monoliths, but dynamic subjects to change. It took some centuries before theatre was considered to be art or 'high culture' in western societies, it took decades for the movies to achieve the same, and computergames still aren't accepted as art by the 'cultural-establishment'. No one knows how long it will take untill blogs are accepted as a literary genre outside the blogosphere. And I am not at all sure if traditional concepts like 'literary genre' are even suitable for describing e.g. the blog-phenomenon.

To end a long rant: I completely second Lindon Parker's and Tom Coates' arguments.

4. Liz Lawley on October 30, 2003 7:37 AM writes...

Neither Paglia nor I are saying that blogs aren't successful. Just that they aren't likely to dethrone traditional media--at least not in their current form.

Tom, e-mail wasn't really presented as a new literary form, or as a replacement for traditional media forms. Blogs have been, over and over again. I'm not agreeing with all of Paglia's claims, by any means, and I'm not arguing that "blogs are not successful." But I do think that reports of blogs' larger-scale influences have been greatly exaggerated.

Alexander, as a librarian I"m pretty attuned to explicit or veiled criticism of libraries, but I didn't see that in Paglia's piece. The image she conjured up for me was *my* basement, where there are indeed boxes of musty discarded books, the ones that couldn't even be palmed off on unsuspecting garage sale shoppers.

5. Douglas Galbi on October 30, 2003 11:40 AM writes...

Paglia: "I don’t see blogs as a new frontier but as a falling backwards into word-centric print journalism — words, words, words!"

The cost of using pictures in blogs is much lower than the cost of using them in print journalism. Has anyone studied the use of non-verbal images in blogs? Particularly with rapidly increasing use of digital cameras, "words, words, words" may not be how blogging will develop.

Sensuous choices, such as choices between text, voice, and images, will significantly affect communication industry developments. I've looked at these issues in my work, "Sense in Communication," available at www.galbithink.org More analysis and discussion of these issues would be helpful for informing communications policy.

6. Francois Lachance on October 30, 2003 3:29 PM writes...

On visual and verbal text combos in blogs, see the entries grouped in the category "images" at jill/txt http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/

On the Eros of Blogs:
Surely Paglia, caught looking, would recognize the value of masturbation. As a voyeur, would that she could dump the scopophilic guilt. She seems to forget that she blinks.

If one were to judge her remarks about blogs as analogous to her remarks about highway saftey (no stats on trends in fatalities per capita): http://www.salon.com/june97/columnists/paglia970610.html
"Driving is the American sublime," I declared in the Lord Byron chapter of "Sexual Personae."

Blogging is the International Sublime. All the micro events reiterated accummulate into effects akin to the mathematical sublime. The figuration of the sublime like the figuration of the human form has a history. Blogging has a figure (no not a name superstar). It is ever a work in process. It is of course an animated map. Sublime.

Sublime because of the human coordination working towards the markup for the geodata, working towards sustaining the networks that provide the ping power, working towards discussing the cultural implications of which map projections are pleasing and politically sensitive (e.g. Peter's Projection http://www.petersmap.com/table.html "A map which shows countries in their true perspective. This also means that the equator is placed in the middle, instead of the usual allocation of 2/3 of the map to the northern hemisphere, and only 1/3 to the southern hemisphere." http://www.traveldirectorynet.co.uk/books/code/RGLpart63/1869847903_World_Map_Peters_Projection.html)

Maybe Salon will interview Paglia on maps !!

7. Tom Coates on November 3, 2003 8:27 PM writes...

Liz - Blogs' larger scale influences may indeed turn out to have been grotesquely exaggerated, but interestingly enough (with a few exceptions) I don'ty think they'll be exaggerated that much by webloggers... Don't get me wrong - I think weblogs are extremely powerful and involving things - but normally the things that the press reacts negatively to and complains about re: the presentation and representation of weblogs are exactly the same things that a different columnist in a different paper decided they had to put into their article about weblogs to demonstrate why they were important enough to be worth writing about (and getting paid for) in the first place. In other words, journalists have to couch articles about new trends as if they were all interesting and world-changing, otherwise - what's the point. No journalist writes an article about "New boring developments that will have no impact". They have to write articles that explain why weblogs are interesting and they just routinely pick on the wrong things. In other words, the press reacts against the press for being the press and the webloggers - for the most part - just get on with writing their sites and communicating with friends and sticking up photos of their children or their cats. For the most part, the value of weblogs lies in the tiny clumps and connections at the dog end of the Power Law - in people producing tiny sites for themselves and their friends and families that get little or no traffic. But of course that's extremely unglamourous and non-celebrity focused and as a result extremely dull to celebrity academics like Paglia.

8. Lucas Fletcher on November 4, 2003 12:00 AM writes...

Blogs are for NEW stuff. Time dependent, nowish stuff. People perpetually absorbed in the NEW, the what's happening, the keeping up with the gossip and all that, they tend to be pretty spontaneous and undisciplined I find. Thus blogs are these things too.

9. xian on November 4, 2003 6:39 PM writes...

The silly part is where Paglia asserts that anyone thinks that Kausfiles was the first blog. She should at least learn about something before pontificating about it, or claiming to have pioneered it. At least Little Richard (clearly one of her stylistic influences) has some basis for his own claim to have invented rock 'n' roll.