On The Margins

Monday May 16, 2005

[ Culture ] The Fine Art of Webloging and Immutability

Weblogs admit a daunting range of expressive styles, topics, media and direction.

What makes each weblog unique is the persona and the focus of the writer. Without a personal voice, weblog becomes another information "hub" or "portal" at best. With too much personality-based bickering it can turn into a very bad version of a "chat" room.

So, what does this broad versatility of weblogs mean in the long run of history? Will there be more people taking time out of their precious lives webloging? Will there be less of them? What will become of all the weblogs? Will we have, as a global civilization, masses and masses of notes, recorded in the multitudes of our beautiful languages, about how we lived, ate, walked, worked, talked, consumed and thought? Is this another publishing medium that brings writing to a broader base of authors, as was done with the advent of book printing, which replaced hand-written (or carved) propagation as the only means of spreading ideas?

One thing is for sure. Weblogging reduces the transaction cost of publishing to potential readers, and the exposure of one's personal whims only builds greater trust between the author and the reader. Elsewhere on this blog, I have discussed the importance of the pen and the paper to the writer, the reader and the learner. Here, I have also written about trust in the cyberspace. In general, we need to pay greater attention to exploring the much larger problem of how instruments we use can determine not only our intelligence but also our moral state and ethical behavior.

On the historial scale, the internet has not yet proven itself to be a replacement for books when it comes to immutability.

The multiplicity in the physical existance of the book, itself, is a guarantor of its chances of survival. People who build failure-resilient systems already know the value of physical multiplicity of identical instances of a system.

The physical multiplicity we have of weblogs is in the shear numbers of private publications, some of which may have a chance to survive over the centuries as a testimony of what happened to us now. Could this be a case where micro-motives and behaviors giving rise to macro-behavior and effects? Since electronic survival becomes somewhat random, with a severe and punishing destructive force in play, what exactly will we have in what survives?

Blogs, Writing, Books, Pen, Paper.

2005-05-16 08:14:06.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.