Made out of people

Blogs in the Epistolary Tradition

(Reprinted from Metablog)

There are a couple of interesting technological recurrences that are worth discussing. One of them is literary form of the epistolary tradition. (Which is also in keeping with my usual attempts to explore the non-exceptionalism of new media.)

• The Letter is the classic written form, and makes for useful, archivable records of someone's writing.
• The Email message which has--for some--all but replaced the letter. (This is slightly unfair to email: the letter had, perhaps, been rather ill for some time earlier: ever since affordable long-distance telephone calls inexpensively outsped letters, the letter may have become a method to relay some sorts of thoughts, but certainly had lost much of its salience; email, then, partially rescued and re-filled that particular gap.)
• The Blog, in which the email message is magnified outward, allowing pretty much anyone to write pretty much anything once again.

I'm not the first to tie email to the epistolary tradition: see essays like "Email and Epistolary technologies: Presence, Intimacy, Disembodiment" for--I think--fruitful discussions of how people literarily concieve of themselves within letters. It would be easy and interesting to tie many of the ideas in this article into blogs--indeed, blogs are sometimes more nakedly confessional than the essay discusses.

At the same time, there was a parallel tradition of persons sharing their opinions publically:

• (17th century) The Leaflet and Broadsheet--and here I'm thinking of Samuel Johnson's Rambler and Idler, for example--in which people who had something to say went about giving out prints, and those who were interested paid a small amount to get it.
• (18th century) The Newspaper, a descendant of the Leaflet, in which many different ideas were co-arranged as to create a single source for gaining knowledge about new events. (Both the notion of "all the news" and "objective" were later inserted; they are not fundamental to the medium.)
• (late 20th century) The Usenet post which--disregarding the conversational aspects--was, in many of the same ways, a forum for just-about-anyone to say just-about-anything to just-about-anyone. To be sure, you had to have a separate NNTP reader, and there's no question that HTML has made blogging more popular than other forms might have been.

I would suggest that these forms are both important to get at the gist of how a blog functions as a series of literary persona.