unsettled

Anyone who's feeling a little bummed out at Chris Sheil's recent departure from the 'sphere has just been handed another bummer
Gummo calls it a day.

I was indeed reeling from the loss of Back Pages on the day I met up with some of the bloggers for dinner and unveiling. BP was becoming the place to check into - a gpo. During the election there was that thing of everytime you'd refresh there'd be 3 more comments - what's the old media equivalent for such rapidfire discussion? Also Chris's reasons for stopping resonate. A big project like a book or a play is probably incompatible with the sport of blogging. As William Gibson famously noted

One thing that was immediately clear to me, from the first blog, is that this is not an activity, for me, that can coexist with the writing of a novel. In some way I only dimly apprehend, it requires too much of the same bandwidth (yet never engages anything like the total *available* bandwidth).

But, definitely, the ecology of novelization and the ecology of blogging couldn't coexist, for me ...

In this week of big planetary activity, with Scott (our generous host) also announcing a break, one of my favourite bloggers quietly reappeared after a year's absence. I had studiously kept the name on the blogroll as an act of faith or a souvenir of old paths. I may keep the Tugboat moored here for a while.

And suddenly there are blogs everywhere in a new wave.
I wonder if someone is charting it all, and can chronicle the skiffle and the currents? An index of genesis and exodus. A log of blogs.
You'd think the medium is built for auto-recording and archival study, with the digital traces of individual and group activity stored somewhere with a google master key, but perhaps that's one of the illusions of the game, and things can disappear into the ether here as in any old medium. We're all archived but it is essentially ephemeral, and a post about the weather will aways score comments. Never quite had the nerve to go completely minimalist and post the temperature (with a link to the BOM of course) but one day that may do as a forecast of hiatus. SomeI'mThing

An article on the academic dilemma of studying (colonising) weblogs noted:

This is part of the nature of weblogs: a personal expression of perhaps not community but an understanding of connectedness. To post online is to declare that you are part of something larger, even if the post is just in order to whine about dinner or about having lost a boyfriend. To study weblogs should not just be a study of form and technicalities, but of interconnectedness

Weblogs and the Dilemma of Academia (via Jerz's Literacy Weblog

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Comments: unsettled

"interconnectedness"

In a nutshell.

All as sweet as a nut.

Nutty sweetness.

Sweet nutiness.

Sweaty neatness.

No sweat!


Posted by Sedgwick at November 21, 2004 05:26 PM

Tempted to use "sweet nuttiness" as a replacement for "I rarely have a name y'know" - except I guess sweetness is in the eyes of the beholder.
Quite happy to be thought of as nutty.
Posted by boynton at November 21, 2004 05:40 PM