Can You Feel A Blog ?

But more importantly, can you smell a blog?

Will we soon be offering each other blogmakeovers?

Trading webspaces? I somehow doubt that…but your points are well taken.

What’s so very odd about reading blogs - I always imagine - involuntarily - the space around the space, the spot where you or any other blogger blogs. The desk, the computer.

And yes there are the photos, but I would have to think it might be an interesting writing excercise to envision the bloggers blogspace. Or, better, have bloggers describe their desks. I did this once with my kitchen table, where I was writing, and what I saw, that I had failed to see, was quite amazing.

How do I see your blogging space? Does it mesh with your template?

The excercise is less fair with someone you’ve met. I know you blog in your kitchen. But I see you blogging on a stool, your computer on the clean neat counter, near the Bodum coffee maker, Leonard Cohen playing, the dominant smell of a Cuban cigar overwhleming the fair trade Guatemalen which you sip from a smaller white porcelian mug etc…

So yeah you can feel a blog.

I think it was Anthony Burgess who once wrote that when you read enough of a writer - and he was referring to novelists and used Conrad and Dickens as examples - you eventually see emerging from the page, as you read, a vision or picture of the authour’s face. In the case of Dickens it was a big sprawling vibrant generous face.

This hit me hard. True, especially so with an authour whose face you may not know. Phillip Roth is one for me. I’ve never really seen a photo of him. Saul Bellow I have. But still the picture I have of him in my mind when I read him is somewhat different than any of the dozen dustjacket snaps.

But I’m wondering why instead of a bloggers face I see the space - imagined, of course - that the blogger occupies. I wonder why the difference?

Novelists faces; bloggers spaces.

Amen to this.

Two remarks. First: my introduction to CMC sociality, before blogging, was MOOs. MOOs and MUDs have their political coups and intrigues that rival any in real life Considerably more intense than blogging, really, because there’s always a struggle to control a shared space–people can’t fragment off into groups of like-minded so easily. In those days there was a lot of theorizing about MOOs (remember Julian Dibbell?) and relatedly a lot theorizing about the multiple identities people use in cyberspace, how they allow people to experiment with selfhood–by which was meant mainly (though covertly) “deceive” or “trick”. There was all this pomo stab-Caesar exultation about overcoming icky bourgeois myths of “authenticity” and all that. What struck me, though, was how easy it was to read people in MOOs–how hard it was for people to be anything but themselves. I was on the fringes of some of these political frays, chatting with people from both sides, and nearly every speculation I formed about someone’s “true character” and “true politics” (when and how they were lying, what they secretly valued, who they were aligned with, what motivated their withholdings, whether I’d want to have dinner with them) was exactly correct in the long run. To be sure, by comparison with blogging there are more cues for such surmises in synchronous exchange…for example, slow speed of response, especially typing delays, could often be taken as evidence of lying (and people realized this from the beginning: if there were let-me-figure-out-how-to-concoct-a-plausible-story delays, people would always claim to be multitasking because they realized the delay was suspect. “Sorry, something in another window I had to take care of,” etc.) Still I was always struck by how difficult it was to deceive in cyberspace over the long term, if your meetings with people grew into “relationships” of even the most minimal kind. Even more than that, it shocked me again and again how you could decide that someone had a heart of gold, or was a snake in the grass, on the tiniest bits of rhetorical evidence–and be right a couple of years down the road, be right in fact with extraordinary nuance.

Second: similarly, in blogging, “tone” is really the best predictor of someone’s politics over the long term. In fact the emotional templates indexed by “tone” are what really drive so-called political decisionmaking anyway for most people. When the liberal hawks flirted with left-baiting after 9/11, I had a nearly perfect track record for predicting which ones would come back to the fold when the war went sour and which would continue to fluff Instapundit and complete their conversion to the right with Hitchens as their model whore. It was all in the sneer, the excitement of being able to sneer with the gun-wielding majority for a change, sneer at those at a rhetorical and social disadvantage. It had the character of relief: now after all these years I get a chance to be one of the bullies! If you could smell that on someone, there was no way he was coming back, ever. It wasn’t cognitive. It had nothing to do with argumentation or position-taking, which was often byzantine and provided lots of debateclub cover. It was about identity panic and identity conversion–and the “tell,” as gamblers would say, was in the tone. Nothing about the blogging world to this day exasperates me more than centrist bloggers who don’t get this, who are deaf to tone and all it implies, in the strictest scientific sense of prediction.

Here’s the bonus third point: every cultural theory we’ve had since the “linguistic turn” renders notions like “tone” completely untheorizable. The universal assumption these days is “cognitivist”: that the emotional and “bodily” experiences you’re talking about are mere epiphenomena of linguistic cognition. You can easily imagine the seminar-room triumph of the textualist here: how could they be anything else, Jon, when all you have before you is a bloggy text? Notwithstanding, emotion and its kinesthetic satellites are neither reducible to language nor part of some unarticulable “excess” or “sublime.” It’s just that we’ve spent the better part of a century dogmatically trashing any theory or vocabulary that would give us a better purchase on how they work. That’s why they remain so mysterious.

Don’t blog in my kitchen any more. I now have a “space” which conceptually would have been my office until I started blogging. This space is also my bedroom, and my lair. I have an antique writer’s desk, you know the kind with black leather panes with gold embossing on the edges, two rectangular drawers on eiother side and a wider rectangular drawer in the middle. My ‘office” is actually my little iBook. My stereo is withinan arm’s reach, and I play a wide variety of music … world music, Cohen, Maria Callas, Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, John Lee Hooker, Don Grusin, SpyroGyra, Talking heads, Laurie Anderson, Stephane Grappelli, Manu Chao.

No cigar … orange juice or coffee, and the odd spliff … sometimes a glass of $15 - 20-ish red.

I’ve been slowly renovating our (small) condo for the last year or so, and finally at age 50 achieved what I was tryingto do at about age 21 or so … a gorgeous and sexy and funny and tolerant partner, a creative pastime, a nice lair with nice tunes, a nice couch and a half-decent tv for movies or the odd sports or cooking show, a funky and iconoclastic (and getting old) car, arhythm to life that I can almost always call my own, and so on … and I blog, and it’s a reasonable part of theat scenario and of my days.

What I am indeed very interested in is our presence on ours and others blogs, and how changes, growth and regression are noticed. I have been struck, indeed, by the evolution I have seen … in terms of the issues, the depth and focus of thinking, the palpable sense of real dialogue .. .that I have noticed build on the Wealth Bondage blog over the past year-plus. That said, I think Phil is a master facilitator (master human being ?), and even so, I think I perceive and feel, for real, a growth edge in him … what he’s interested in, why and how he both expresses it and goes about it. A wonderful thing to behold.

As with you, imho, bmo. Shit more or less a year ago you quite, or went into blogatonia (hiatus, i think they call it). Look at you now, you crazy diamond.

T.V.

Whew ! Give me a chance to read your comment a couple of more times, so that I can ensure that I’ve given it the attention I believe it deserves.

I’m guilty … often yesterday, and all the while that I was taking a shower this morning, I kept remembering that I promised to come back to T.V.’s comment … and so here I am. And to have not returned to this, after I suggested I would, would have been a nifty example of what we’re on about in this blog item and subsequent comments.

First, your:

Still I was always struck by how difficult it was to deceive in cyberspace over the long term, if your meetings with people grew into “relationships” of even the most minimal kind. Even more than that, it shocked me again and again how you could decide that someone had a heart of gold, or was a snake in the grass, on the tiniest bits of rhetorical evidence–and be right a couple of years down the road, be right in fact with extraordinary nuance.

This observation, and your points about MOOs are great. What i wonder about MOOs, knowing very little about them, is what you think about whther or not MOOs or blogging are more like “real life”, in terms of beginning conversations and interaction, sharing space, if you will, and then going on about life having had those interactions. Do MOOs make you think offline about the conversations and exchanges you’re having, as I do ?

Second, your point:

It wasn’t cognitive. It had nothing to do with argumentation or position-taking, which was often byzantine and provided lots of debateclub cover. It was about identity panic and identity conversion–and the “tell,” as gamblers would say, was in the tone. Nothing about the blogging world to this day exasperates me more than centrist bloggers who don’t get this, who are deaf to tone and all it implies, in the strictest scientific sense of prediction.

Couldn’t agree more … I really think this blogging thing will take off big time when some additional easy-to-use and effective “presence” capabilities become incorporated. One of the early and continuing criticisms of blogging as an effective means of communications is the absence of body language, and I have pushed back against that any number of times (several related posts on what I have called “bloggy language” or being “aggregarious”. And all this is very very hopeful, imo. I’d maintain (as I’m guessing you would) that it’s actually very very difficult to lie over an extended period of time online, or via a blog … it requires attention to what you’cve said, and requires maintaining a similar “tone”, and guess what … blogging comes form inside us, and bits oif whio and what we are tend to leak out all over the place (as they often do in real life, but we tend to be more practiced in masking that in the 3D world … maybe because often we need to, for work or social standing in a community).

Point three: Untheorizable ?

That’s good, isn’t it ? It means we all get to watch it grow and evolve, and become something that we can all have a part in, as opposed to some experts coming along and telling us how it is and will be.

Thanks TV, for a post that made me think hard and learn.

Jon, thanks. For those unacquainted with MOOs (not necessarily you), I make this list about the four important features of a MOO, and I make it in the past tense because MOOs are, you know, so nineties.

MOOs were like chat rooms except:

1) You weren’t limited to one or two lines of text, as in old chat modules (this is what tends to make chat & IM so superficial); you could talk in paragraphs.

2) All dialogic exchanges appeared onscreen framed by “X says”: if Jon types “What are MOOs?” it appears onscreen as “Jon says, “What are MOOs?”

3) this seemingly simple ‘narrativizing’ of exchange allowed something quite magnificent: textual embodiment. You could punctuate your exchange with facial expressions and bodily movements. You could laugh: “Jon slaps his knee and guffaws” or, if your character were a dog, you could express boredom: “Fido snaps at a passing fly.” These could be written as macros, executed with a couple of keystrokes. You could also control verbs for dialogue to emphasize tone: “Jon shrieks,” “Jon muses,” etc.

4) On top of this, there were ‘objects’ that one could see and even exchange: I could give you an award plaque (type give Jon plaque, you see “T.V. gives Jon a plaque”) and you could look at it (type look plaque; depending on what I’d written you might then read onscreen: “You see a carved walnut plaque with silver inlay that calligraphically reads: JON HUSBAND — MOST CANADIAN OF THE CANADIAN BLOGGERS.”) Similarly, you could move through rooms, look at their furniture, be interrupted by energizer bunnies or other robots moving through your ’space,’ and so on, all due to the object-oriented nature of the textual landscape.

MOOs are better than blogging and far better than chat or instant messaging for gossip and loneliness-relief, and above all for PLAY. They turned out to be too limited for “serious” uses. People tried having real-time meetings for serious discussion–but though better than chat, the time limitations of typed exchange in MOOs are still too much of an obstacle for any deep discussion to emerge. Synchronous presence doesn’t add enough to make it worth anyone’s while–better to exchange blog posts or messages on a listserve if you really want to exchange substantive ideas. For play among smart people, though, they are quite something. Their superiority increases to the extent that you find people who are willing to be very creative in using their potential, customizing the ‘behaviors’ to their character or coding ‘objects’ for in-jokes.

Finding smart, creative people is much more of a challenge than in blogland, though; MOOs are mainly populated by undergrads looking for simulated textual sex. Even when you find the grownups, you still have to find those who have that synthetic mix of being something other than a dungeons-and-dragons geek yet also self-confident enough to use the medium’s potentialities without fearing that it makes them look like a dungeons-and-dragon geek. They have to have similar schedules to yours, so that they’ll typically be online at the same time as you.

There are also community politics which can be engaging or debilitating depending on the particular case, for which there is really no analogue in blogging. (The only thing I’ve ever seen that was analogous was the Dave Winer case of shutting down blog access and the aftermath–that was just like MOO politics, which are generally about control and distribution of resources, and the trusts and betrayals involved). When you “belong” to a little simulated polis, and have an emotional investment in your membership, you can sometimes learn about technical and sociological matters very efficiently and quickly that you might otherwise cotton to much more slowly if you were only discussing them in the abstract (see this, for example).

As for the specific question you asked about comparing the two media and the way they facilitate interaction, I guess I’d say on balance it’s an even trade; the more overt simulation of body and space in MOOs makes that more vivid in some ways, but for my needs and desires the ability to compose longer essaystic meditations in blogs trumps other considerations in the end. You’re right that there are sufficient clues in extended written exchange to garner “feel” reliably, though I wish we had better ways of talking about just how we manage to do that. One thing that’s different about MOOs and blogs is the basis for connection: with blogs, it’s usually some explicitly shared viewpoint on social or political or aesthetic issues that binds people. In MOOs, it’s more characterological: wit, heart, charisma. The people you’d like to go have lunch with. My experience also suggests that the friendships and enmities you make in MOOs may be more intense and more like “real life.” The only people I’ve revealed my identity to and/or met outside of cyberspace are MOO friends, and the MOO friendships that ended in no-longer-on-speaking-terms fights were emotionally ugly and still seem fresh. That’s one place the synchronous exchange really makes a difference. Compare a fight between pen pals to a shouting match over the phone: the latter is more likely to lead to saying things you can’t take back, and more likely to leave scars.

Thanks again to you, TV.

One of the things I’ve noticed (whilst I’ving with other selfhoos) is that exchanges entered into whilst blogging can generate friction and disagreement.

BUT such exchanges that I’ve experienced have most often led to a process of trying to understand the other and clear the space for mutual understanding or doisagreement, and finding the leverage points for learning and moving on/forward. Dialogue at it’s best.