Blog Writing About Blogging Writing
If you like NY Times book review's Sarah Boxer's comprehensive look at Blogs, you might want to take a look at her book on the subject: Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web (Vintage, 2008). The article provides a history of the genre(?), movement(?) and insights that had not occurred to this insider. Her writing makes me feel like I'm writing from inside a warm, pink, fuzzy bubble; living all inside my own mind. But wait! Maybe I am, for she ends the piece this way:Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)Other books on blogging mentioned in the article:
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla, with an introduction by Rebecca Blood
Basic Books, 242 pp., $20.00
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
by Lee Siegel
Spiegel and Grau, 182 pp., $22.95
Republic.com 2.0
by Cass R. Sunstein
Princeton University Press, 251 pp., $24.95
Blogwars
by David D. Perlmutter
Oxford University Press, 235 pp., $24.95
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Yale University Press, 247 pp., $24.00
We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Lawin the Internet Age
by Scott Gant
Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt
Nelson Books, 225 pp., $14.99 (paper)
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen
Doubleday/Currency, 228 pp., $22.95
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters
Wiley, 252 pp., $24.95
Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline and Dan Burstein
CDS Books, 402 pp., $24.95
posted by Georganna Hancock | 7:52 AM
3 Comments:
Very interesting and informative post about perspectives on blogging.
BTW, regarding one of the titles. It's my opinion that blogging fosters awareness and communication. The question of authenticity pertains even in real-time interactions, as well as on the Blogosphere.
I think it's the media and game violence that are killing our culture. And I am a liberal, all for freedom of expression. But where do we draw the line? Does a responsible parent scream expletives at and threaten his/her children with bodily harm? What gives the media carte blanche to wall us in with images of violence?
Thanks for the comments, Lynda. Your point about authenticity in RL is so true. At some point, I'll bet, we have all looked skeptically (in RL) at someone and thought, "You phony!"
But I get all cranked up when people tar all blogs and bloggers with the same brush. That says that they don't know what they're talking about, haven't taken the time to search out writers of interest to them. What do they do in bookstores: grab the first book on the nearest shelf and then trash books when they don't like it?
As always, Georganna, you offer a wealth of information. I've read several reviews of The Ultimate Blogs book.
The one that caught my eye? "The Cult of the Amateur." I like to imagine myself as an ultimate amateur.
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