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Monday, July 04, 2005
BLOGOSCOPY UD just sent off to her co-author a revised chapter of a book they’ve been working on, and she noticed that in the act of rewriting she consulted her blog a lot. Quotations, paragraphs, ideas about beauty (the book’s about the return of aesthetic considerations to literary study in the university classroom, and in the larger culture, after years of beauty’s dismissal by theorists) were scattered about the blog’s pages. They had only to be picked up, reworked slightly, and inserted into the revision. A story in this morning’s New York Times confirms that other essayists, novelists, and scholars, are discovering the same thing. For years, book authors have used the Internet to publicize their work and to keep in touch with readers. Several … are now experimenting with maintaining blogs while still in the act of writing their books. This is the sort of outcome Terry Teachout has in mind, I think, when he anticipates that bloggers, a “network of free-standing, independent commentators who self-publish their thoughts where they can be heard by anyone who cares to listen,” may be creating “a new kind of common culture. …I still feel the need for a common space in which Americans can come together to talk about the things that matter to us all. And so my hope is that the blogosphere, for all its fissiparous tendencies, will evolve over time into just such a space. No doubt there will always be shouting in the blogosphere, but it need not all be past each other. When the history of blogging is written a half-century from now, its chroniclers may yet record that the highest achievement of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, turned out to be its unprecedented ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.” |