tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post3516249769480894528..comments2024-03-12T00:51:27.766-04:00Comments on Ground Motive: The Gesture of Bloggingadmin1http://www.blogger.com/profile/16479743334126277132noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-65463419026248599162015-08-18T00:00:39.980-04:002015-08-18T00:00:39.980-04:00Pre computer age had type of paper and pencil or p...Pre computer age had type of paper and pencil or pen issues to deal with. Doodling on paper was casual. Reproduction and distribution before the internet was quite costly and time consuming. Now it is essentially free and immediate. aguilla1https://www.blogger.com/profile/02173462156076377409noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-55556928212777680192015-07-28T10:06:50.493-04:002015-07-28T10:06:50.493-04:00Your discussion of blogging and labour in your res...Your discussion of blogging and labour in your response to me is really interesting. I hear you implying that our category of labour comes to us from out of the industrial age and as such distorts quite as much as it reveals about the new cultural form, blogging. There is something I recognize in what you are saying but then presumably labour would be equally unsuited to what the peasant, servant, or artisan does in a pre-industrial economy. But what if we saw labour as an analogical notion adaptable to other economic forms than that of the industrial age that Marx had in front of him? Would a truly post-industrial notion of labour not be imaginable and if imagined is it your guess that it would still not illumine the contours of blogging without offsetting distortions so profound as to make the concept inappropriate (which I take to be one of your theses heretofore)?Bob Sweetmannoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-70703626422827400072015-07-27T13:43:59.640-04:002015-07-27T13:43:59.640-04:00Two notes
re: reversibility
This is right, digit...Two notes<br /><br />re: reversibility<br /><br />This is right, digital writing interjects reversibility. That's what I mean when I say in my last paragraph that writing becomes circular. Maybe nonlinear is even a better term than either circular or reversible. The point is that the nonlinearity in digital writing reduces possible barriers to autocatalysis (the mechanism that keeps interaction and production moving). Instead of offering edits later, additional pieces, or whatever one can simply jump back into a piece. <br /><br />However, I'm skeptical to say that this change is without additional consequences or that this description carries a full account of what happens. Each platform itself has different rules that a writer has to play with or be restricted by. Though, those specific rules are often neglected because reading software, like we read a text, is not a practice critics often undertake. For example, writing in microsoft office is different than writing in google docs and these differences surely influence our thinking, but do we have the theoretical tools for understanding these minute differences? Each platform carries different possibilities and potentialities that we ought to consider. For example, something as small as the key combinations and short cuts offer a lot to the act of writing digitally. <br /><br />Re: social position and labor<br /><br />Maybe this is unhelpful or just painfully obvious, but analyzing blogging as a type labor is difficult because there is an incredible amount of diversity in how bloggers work, their impetus for blogging and how they're compensated. It is fundamentally a different mode of labor than industrialism. There is no office or factory, no set wage, no labor time and who even knows how to calculate the labor power for this sort of thing.<br /><br />For example, Ground Motive, is comprised of students, faculty, etc all writing out of a mixture of self-directed interest and the nice immaterial goods that come along with blogging. (some minor recognition, self-promotion, a nice page that appears when you google yourself.) However, there are also blogs that individuals and firms run as an attempt at marketing. Blogs that review products and attempt to market those products are often compensated materially, however not always in the form of a wage. <br /><br />Either way, leisure is important to take note of. Writing for Ground Motives was leisurely because there was no deadline, I could choose my topic, the editors are lovely people and most importantly I enjoyed it. On the other hand, In the case of a blog that markets products, the affect of leisure at least has to be demonstrated spectacularly or else the "style" of the blog loses it's rhetorical power and it just looks like an overt marketing attempt. <br /><br />This is how blogging, as intellectual worker, becomes different from the novelist and the others. Not only does one have to market products, but they have to do it subtly to keep alive the casualness of the whole endeavor. Keeping up the rhetorical references to casualness and leisure are important stylistic features that also have to be produced. To blog, one has to encode the production as leisure or else it's sort of pointless for the marketeers. Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00333522803219162805noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5846671056195917287.post-71228533848154283552015-07-27T12:18:27.626-04:002015-07-27T12:18:27.626-04:00I was interested in your clear sense of something ...I was interested in your clear sense of something new occurring in the act of blogging. Much of your analysis stuck with the materiality of the acts of writing you were considering. It struck me that you had to exaggerate the material difference between the typewriter and the computer, even as Heidegger had to exaggerate the difference between handwriting and typing: exaggeration opened up something else. What seemed to go missing in the process of this exaggeration was something else. You see, it seems to me that a difference that stands out for many of us who had to make the mental adjustment to writing via the medium of the personal computer was difference between a medium that punished to a medium that facilitated revision. On a computer, nothing needs to be stuck with for revisions are easy; even the most complex revisions can occur with very little fuss and muss. That introduces a fluidity to writing that influences thinking. One doesn't dig in nearly so fast because text is itself so revisable. This change does not make it into your analysis. When you do speak concretely about the blogger and the act of blogging you contrast the blogger's social position with that of the intellectual worker. The blogger takes up a position of relative leisure with respect to the intellectual worker. That is true but is that in fact new? It seems to me that the blogger in that regard inhabits a social space that looks more like that of the novelist and poet than the journalist or other form of intellectual worker. So are you saying that the blogger who makes her living from blogging (like the intellectual worker) is one who is positioned differently vis-a-vis her work by virtue of the leisure structured into the very fabric of the act, a leisure that overlaps with that of the writing artist: that is, the novelist, dramaturgue, poet, etc.? Let's say this is what you were getting at. That makes me wonder how the revisability that the computer enables maps on to the social "between-ness" of the blogger? Bob Sweetmannoreply@blogger.com