Meredith L. McGill: Lurking in the Blogosphere of the 1840s
[Meredith L. McGill examines the relations between intellectual property law and literary publishing in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia, 2003). She is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.]
These days I find I’m turning more and more to Internet blogs for the kind of sustenance I used to derive from magazine writing. The magazines pile up unread as I spend my time hunched over my computer, checking in on my favorite academic, political, and cultural blogs, lost in a seemingly infinite sequence of Web pages as I click my way through link after link. For a while I tried to dismiss my blog habit as the latest in a series of procrastination techniques, one made alarmingly easy and seductive by media convergence. Rather than beckoning to me from the coffee table, these multimedia magazine-substitutes set up shop right here on my computer where my real work is supposed to reside.
Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if the time I spend lurking in the blogosphere might actually bring me back to my work, enriching rather than distracting me from my research on the expanding print media of the 1840s. Can living through a volatile period of media shift tell us something about comparable periods in the past? Will awareness of incipient changes in our own reading habits make us better students of the history of reading?
One lesson that can be drawn from the strange allure of blogs is that when new media seek to compete with established media, periodicity matters. Whether blogs focus on breaking news, a topic of concern to a particular community, or the minutiae of ordinary life, they share an architecture built on the promise of the new. Blogs are comprised of frequently updated entries presented in reverse chronological order; they give graphic priority to the most recent entry while allowing past writing to scroll slowly out of sight. While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds now permit readers to "subscribe" to many of their favorite blogs, notifying them when these Websites have been updated, blogs have historically depended on the promise of new entries to encourage repeat visits to their sites. News-based blogs and those devoted to cultural commentary ordinarily piggyback on existing print and electronic media, excerpting items of interest for editorial reframing and reader response. In making their selections, individual bloggers and blogging collectives also reperiodize their source material, transforming the daily newspaper, weekly review—or even, thanks to "Youtube," the regularly scheduled television show—into a sequence of smaller snippets delivered to readers at shorter intervals throughout the day or week....
Read entire article at Common-Place
These days I find I’m turning more and more to Internet blogs for the kind of sustenance I used to derive from magazine writing. The magazines pile up unread as I spend my time hunched over my computer, checking in on my favorite academic, political, and cultural blogs, lost in a seemingly infinite sequence of Web pages as I click my way through link after link. For a while I tried to dismiss my blog habit as the latest in a series of procrastination techniques, one made alarmingly easy and seductive by media convergence. Rather than beckoning to me from the coffee table, these multimedia magazine-substitutes set up shop right here on my computer where my real work is supposed to reside.
Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if the time I spend lurking in the blogosphere might actually bring me back to my work, enriching rather than distracting me from my research on the expanding print media of the 1840s. Can living through a volatile period of media shift tell us something about comparable periods in the past? Will awareness of incipient changes in our own reading habits make us better students of the history of reading?
One lesson that can be drawn from the strange allure of blogs is that when new media seek to compete with established media, periodicity matters. Whether blogs focus on breaking news, a topic of concern to a particular community, or the minutiae of ordinary life, they share an architecture built on the promise of the new. Blogs are comprised of frequently updated entries presented in reverse chronological order; they give graphic priority to the most recent entry while allowing past writing to scroll slowly out of sight. While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds now permit readers to "subscribe" to many of their favorite blogs, notifying them when these Websites have been updated, blogs have historically depended on the promise of new entries to encourage repeat visits to their sites. News-based blogs and those devoted to cultural commentary ordinarily piggyback on existing print and electronic media, excerpting items of interest for editorial reframing and reader response. In making their selections, individual bloggers and blogging collectives also reperiodize their source material, transforming the daily newspaper, weekly review—or even, thanks to "Youtube," the regularly scheduled television show—into a sequence of smaller snippets delivered to readers at shorter intervals throughout the day or week....