{"id":211,"date":"2005-07-13T10:13:10","date_gmt":"2005-07-13T14:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=211"},"modified":"2005-07-13T10:13:10","modified_gmt":"2005-07-13T14:13:10","slug":"211","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/211\/","title":{"rendered":"Historical Analogues for Blogging"},"content":{"rendered":"

Johns Hopkins grad student Caleb McDaniel has written a very intriguing and persuasive essay in Common-Place<\/a> on historical analogues for blogging. McDaniel’s argument makes a strategic move away from writers and toward readers-who-write, a move I have found very helpful in trying to make sense of canon debates as well. Favorite pull-quote of the moment:<\/p>\n

And despite our differences from antebellum readers, the central challenge for us, as it was for them, is not how to gain access to an abundance of information, but how to decide what information to acquire and which associations to make. In real terms, bloggers do have access to more information than nineteenth-century readers did, but there is only so much information that any one reader can digest, so the problem for both still becomes what to read and how to read it. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

McDaniel’s essay goes a long way toward explaining the blogosphere’s fascination and compelling power for me, although I’d expand its parameters beyond print culture (as I suspect McDaniel would too). It really is an Engelbartian augmentation<\/a> of a practice as old as civilization itself. The interesting question that follows, for me at least, is whether the difference in degree made possible by high-speed networked computing amounts to a difference in kind as well. I’d argue the answer was yes in the case of the printing press, and that it’s also yes in the case of the Internet. How to understand and constructively use the difference is then the next question.<\/p>\n

McDaniel’s essay is available online<\/a>, for instant scholarly gratification. Thanks to The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em><\/a> for the initial story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Johns Hopkins grad student Caleb McDaniel has written a very intriguing and persuasive essay in Common-Place on historical analogues for blogging. McDaniel’s argument makes a strategic move away from writers and toward readers-who-write, a move I have found very helpful … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4bHwM-211","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}