Theory and the Blog

Amardeep Singh has posted a characteristically insightful article on theory and blogging on his own blog. In trying to draw a connection between theory and blogging (before digressing into Spivak-bashing) he defines blogging as:

"a frequent practice of quasi-public expression, which is as comfortable deflecting the self (borrowing, quoting, linking, and anonymity) as it is in expressing it (i.e., your basic confessional blog post). It is also fundamentally interactive..."

That's to say, it both offers escape and provokes a response. This is an interesting observation about blogging because it takes into account the listservs and webpages which are not interactive and draws an important difference between the two. Blogs are important because they both provoke response and serve as example for response, either by mimesis or reaction. Singh earlier in his essay uses Jonathan Culler's definition of theory as denoting works "that succeed in challenging and reorienting thinking in fields other than those to which they apparently belong."

Blogs may serve in a similar way, but are quite different than theory in that theory at least tends toward distinct fields. Blogging is a flexible format in which one can create a constantly evolving Macluhanesque collage of image, video, and writings both expressive and deflective. Because blogging is a "more fundamental approach (in psycho-social terms) to writing" than publication writing, the imperative in blogging is on the individual blogging and what they are trying to conceal/reveal rather than upon any particular field of study. While fields are constantly breached and reshaped, it is the measure of the success of a blog in its ability to contaminate other blogs.
***
My favorite quote of the article:

"Partisan blogging has become more and more prevalent, and is always threatening to turn blogging into an extension of the corporatized world of mass media-entertainment-news-politics. Perhaps I'm referring to the "spirit of blogging" here more than material reality..."

It is nice to hear Singh talk about the the spirit of blogging, the way one might have talked about the spirit of printing when Ben Franklin was young. With bloggers impacting everything from politics to the party down the block, maybe the internet has reached a point where people will start being impacted as they were with printing presses. Back then all one needed to do was read or be read to, while today considerably more sophistication is involved to search for blogs that may be important to you. Maybe enough people are becoming computer-savy enough to make that leap, in which case blogging may well be the next press, the next establishment.