Blogging as Technological Apparatus
Jeff Bridges is about to do a new film. Tom Coates recently spent two nights playing Halo 2 online against American teenagers. This is the information you glean from reading weblogs. According to weblog pioneer Dave Winer, a blog is blog when ‘the voice of a person comes through’. Individuality is blogging’s heart. The blogger needs technological apparatus such as software, competing products, ‘webspace’, access, time, and something to say or point to. I am a half-hearted blogger who struggles to read or write myself into the content of webspace, to commune or share information. But many people do become fully-fledged bloggers, such as Tom Coates, and celebrities such as Jeff Bridges also adopt some of blogging’s features as part of the flattening of web production in which anyone can participate, from William Gibson to any Joe Blogger
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Jeff’s site is his own authorised space, an official personal site with a blog section. Jeff avoids the impersonality of electronic text by using his own handwriting and drawings that are scanned and inserted into webpages as jpgs and gifs. Jeff’s communication is therefore highly individuated. His blog-like entries are scribblings that are entitled ‘Latest’ and they keep the reader in touch with Jeff’s news - the information he wants to share with us – the next film he is going to do (Tideland), the film he has just finished (The Moguls), a film he completed (The Door in the Floor) that is now in the cinemas. Image maps are used as hypertext links to further information such as the people he works with or details of the films. For instance, he links to standard sources of information that can be found at Amazon or the Internet Movie Database.
Jeff Bridges is not a blogger, but he has taken up web technology as an extension of his fame, his profession and his personal interests and the wider mechanisms of publicity and promotion. His webspace is a bespoke personal site and not a weblog facilitated by software or hosted blogger services. There are no archived entries nor two-way ‘comments’ forms. However, he does have a message board and a guest book, modular features of online community. But there is no ‘Jeff Bridges community’. He looks at the postings of the guests and visitors, but he is not an active participant in a community of users. Guests leave admiring messages, often when they have recently seen Jeff in a film. The message board has over 500 members, but they’re not a Jeff Bridges usenet group. The members do not post about Jeff , they post to their own interests. This is not a coherent community and the sharing of information on the site is mostly from Jeff about his professional life to any casual user who might happen by. However, what we do get above all is a sense of the person, Jeff Bridges as someone who is a musician and photographer as well as a film actor, but most of all his interest in world hunger programmes.
In contrast, Tom Coates, a British web production professional, discovered five years ago that a personal site could be organised with weblog technology. He also is not a member of a blogger service, but like Jeff Bridges runs his own domain. Tom, however, uses the ‘feature-rich’ Moveable Type technology used by committed blogosphere participants. Tom’s award-winning blog is firmly embedded in the weblog community of the blogosphere. He links to over thirty other bloggers and to sites such as Blogdex, Daypop and Technorati that track and aggregate bloggers and their blogtalk. As a well-established and well-known blogger, Tom’s entries nearly always receive several comments from regular readers and fellow bloggers. His blog is one of the building blocks of informal and formal webrings that constitute the communal network of online journals. Whereas the publicity of Jeff Bridges.com is part of the self-publicity of celebrity, the publicity of Plasticbag.org is the technoculture of being digital, of using the web as part of the regime of daily life to select information of personal interest and share it with others for comment and feedback.
Tom’s most recent entries are links with brief comments. The links are to things he has seen and done as part of his work and leisure, but focused around web culture and other related media – weblog comics, Flash animations, website design, television audiences and so on. As Tom suggests, a weblog is a ‘space where you can get to know another human being personally’. The significance for Tom of ‘plastic bag’ is that it refers to the ‘beauty in the trivia of our lives’, disposable, but useful, transitory, but meaningful. Whereas Jeff Bridges sees significance in the latest news of his professional life, Tom Coates’ weblog makes being part of web communities significant in itself. Jeff is looking inward and making his work public, Tom is looking outward and trying to connect his personal and professional life to the wider social and cultural ‘trivia’ of the contemporary technoculture.
You can’t generalise about blogs from just two examples. All you can say is that these people in their different ways are bloggers and this is how their personal voice comes through as part of the technological apparatus of the web. They are just a couple of the many people who are addressing the web’s imperative to ‘be there’ and use the extensive ‘technologies of the self’ that the web makes possible as a medium of cultural production. Gauntlett and Horsley’s suggestion that the web is the defining medium of the twenty-first century is a speculative claim. The broadcast technologies of radio and television were the defining media of the last century, but they were not even around in 1904. Jose Luis Orihuela’s seventh paradigm of ‘eCommunication’ identifies the potential significant shift from distribution to access, where ‘[A]ccess means seek, search, navigate, surf, decide: an active attitude, a will to connect and communicate’, but the web is less than twenty years old. Let’s wait and see shall we?
