Interactive Post-Modern Media and Blogging
Well, it has taken me a lot longer to get my third post up due to the veritable oceans of information out there in cyberspace about blogging. And I thought my idea was novel…
Before I launch into the main body of my research I’d like to make a note about commenting on blogs. One of the features which makes blogging an interesting medium is the interactive nature of them. Readers can comment to the posts instantaneously, meaning that author and reader interact with each other in a way and in a speed unmatched by any other form of media. For this reason, readers themselves become authors, as they add to or comment on the text of the blogs. Hypertexts documents such as blogs have an electronic ‘fluidity’ that allows for a new type of post-modern literacy. Snyder describes a hypertext document as, “constructed in part by the authors who create and place the links and in part by the readers who decide what threads to follow” (1995:28). Gallo, discussing blog journalism, describes how the “real-time virtual feed-back loop” of blogging and commenting demands a higher level of accountability and ‘the reflexivity of Weblogs also opens the respondent to the feedback and criticism of other users, allowing every claim to be examined and vetted, leading in turn to increased openness and transparency of dialogue’ (Gallo 2004). Gallo also describes how comments can function in place of the “Letter to the Editor” in an instantaneous way that also allows readers to bypass the editorial intermediary review (Gallo 2004).
Furthermore, an interesting feature of the interactive nature of blogging journalism is that it can reverse the usual order of media – that is the flow of information from press to public (Rosen 2003). This means that knowledge is not static phenomena gifted from the powerful or authoritarian sources, but can also be affected, altered, censored, and even written and re-written by a wider reader and writer audience. In this way blogging, and other hypertext media, can be seen as a kind of ‘historicity’ of the present, or immediate past.
So why am I making this point? I am certainly not by any means claiming to be a journalist, however, this issue does have has relevance for anyone who is attempting to put information, knowledge or even opinion onto the internet. My first post has four comments to date. All of them are generally encouraging messages from, admittedly, people whom I already know who I have given this link to. Although I appreciate the sentiment, and humour, in these comments I was a little perplexed as to why I received an email forwarded from one commenter asking about my use of the word “reflexive”. Of course any form feedback or questions are great, but I would love even more to have them comment on my blog itself so as to exemplify this interactivity of blogging.
In response to the question: Yes, I did mean ‘reflexive’, not ‘reflective’. In anthropology, reflexivity involves acknowledging the subjectivity of the researcher in one’s own research and taking that into account when presenting the research material. The Journal of Neoscience has an interesting and very thorough philosophical approach to exploring reflexivity, but for simpler and more anthropological definitions of ‘reflexivity’ try WebRef, Anthrobase, and this anthropology dictionary.
Before I launch into the main body of my research I’d like to make a note about commenting on blogs. One of the features which makes blogging an interesting medium is the interactive nature of them. Readers can comment to the posts instantaneously, meaning that author and reader interact with each other in a way and in a speed unmatched by any other form of media. For this reason, readers themselves become authors, as they add to or comment on the text of the blogs. Hypertexts documents such as blogs have an electronic ‘fluidity’ that allows for a new type of post-modern literacy. Snyder describes a hypertext document as, “constructed in part by the authors who create and place the links and in part by the readers who decide what threads to follow” (1995:28). Gallo, discussing blog journalism, describes how the “real-time virtual feed-back loop” of blogging and commenting demands a higher level of accountability and ‘the reflexivity of Weblogs also opens the respondent to the feedback and criticism of other users, allowing every claim to be examined and vetted, leading in turn to increased openness and transparency of dialogue’ (Gallo 2004). Gallo also describes how comments can function in place of the “Letter to the Editor” in an instantaneous way that also allows readers to bypass the editorial intermediary review (Gallo 2004).
Furthermore, an interesting feature of the interactive nature of blogging journalism is that it can reverse the usual order of media – that is the flow of information from press to public (Rosen 2003). This means that knowledge is not static phenomena gifted from the powerful or authoritarian sources, but can also be affected, altered, censored, and even written and re-written by a wider reader and writer audience. In this way blogging, and other hypertext media, can be seen as a kind of ‘historicity’ of the present, or immediate past.
So why am I making this point? I am certainly not by any means claiming to be a journalist, however, this issue does have has relevance for anyone who is attempting to put information, knowledge or even opinion onto the internet. My first post has four comments to date. All of them are generally encouraging messages from, admittedly, people whom I already know who I have given this link to. Although I appreciate the sentiment, and humour, in these comments I was a little perplexed as to why I received an email forwarded from one commenter asking about my use of the word “reflexive”. Of course any form feedback or questions are great, but I would love even more to have them comment on my blog itself so as to exemplify this interactivity of blogging.
In response to the question: Yes, I did mean ‘reflexive’, not ‘reflective’. In anthropology, reflexivity involves acknowledging the subjectivity of the researcher in one’s own research and taking that into account when presenting the research material. The Journal of Neoscience has an interesting and very thorough philosophical approach to exploring reflexivity, but for simpler and more anthropological definitions of ‘reflexivity’ try WebRef, Anthrobase, and this anthropology dictionary.
posted by Alida van Klink @ 4:08 PM
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