Applying McLuhan to Blogs:

What is the "message of blogs"? Blogging is a medium for?



Blogging has a kind of "secondary orality". Robert Fowlers describes' Walter Ong's concept of secondary orality.



Blogs are interactive. There is a response from the reader, as in a conversation. Someone is 'listening' to you and responds.



Blogs seem to recall to my mind a picture of disembodied body parts, a separation of mind from body of the person using the internet. So is the use of internet, signified through the movement of blogs a wholing process of global society?



2nd important part of blogging is that it allows you to eternally change your mind. As long as you keep blogging, even if you don't, the implications of what you have blogged somehow changes with the passage of time as well. You can build your concepts as you go along, deconstruct, and create a new line of thinking at any moment.



It is not the blog that's the message. but the interactivity between the disembodied writers and readers. The non-linearity of thinking despite the chronology.



The invisible reader experiences the blog in a multitude of ways, in a different perspective from the writer. The writing is accessed from different journeys, but sharing a kind of story-telling together.



A reader responding considers himself to be blogging as well when he makes responses.



The structure, look, design or even the content of a blog is not the message...



A blog cannot be analyzed, dissected by the design and look or even content of a blog. It needs to be analyzed subjectively, understanding, vibrating at same wave length as the intent of the writer. How many people resonates with it. The quality of the connection made , the connectivity establishes



How to design new methods of evaluating a blog?



The chronology of the blog also doesn't matter. It is produced and read at the moment. A reader reading the blog several years after it was created will feel as if it were being created in front of him as if it was being created in front of his eyes, because of the effect of the screen, which does not give a feeling of the amount of information "behind" the screen. Different from a book, you can look at it and see its limit, its number of pages, read the conclusion, and end, see its structure. Using the computer is different, because behind the screen is an unlimited amount of information, unstructured, no real method applicable, best method is intuitivity. In fact established methods is a detriment.



As time moves forward, intimacy arises.



It's not the content of what you write on a blog that defines it quality or attractiveness, but how you share of yourself,,,, is why so many journals exist.



When you have a potential audience of 6 billion, you know th impossibility of responding to all but the ones you feel you identify with. The best strategy is intuitively following your sense of self-consistency, not much room for ego.



How has blogging changed our relationship with relating and with time, and with access to knowledge or information. That seems to be the message of the blog. Networking. Transparency of identity.



Blogs, will eventually transform itself once its message has been delivered.



Discuss