What is blogging, anyway? The question occurred to me the other day as I was thinking about what I’m doing here and why.

Creating a blog—Geekinese for ”web log”—has been compared to writing a journal. And a blog is sort of like a journal, in the sense that it’s something you add to every day, maybe (maybe not) addressing a single theme. But it isn’t strictly a journal: unless a writer has a very inflated idea of his or her own importance, a journal is written for only one reader—its author. Blogs are written to be read by strangers, often a very large coterie of strangers. Most blogs are designed to elicit responses. In that context, blogging is more like epistolary writing than like journal writing. The blog post compares more accurately to a letter than to a journal entry, and comments amount to letters written back to a correspondent.

Some bloggers think of themselves as Writers, and yes, a few books have come out of successful blogs. But writing a blog is nothing at all like writing a book, and a blog post resembles an article or a chapter only in the vaguest way. Although I sensed this from the outset, not until after I looked over the entries I’ve posted over a couple of months did I realize what a huge job it would be to organize a coherent book out of the material that’s piling up here. Blogging, unlike most print writing, is nonlinear. It doesn’t have a beginning, a middle, and an end; it doesn’t start at one point and go toward another. Instead, blogging meanders. What you write on a given day is what comes to mind that day, not something inspired by a plot or an outline. Overall the blog may have a coherent theme, but the theme is diffuse; it’s not traced out by structure. In that sense, too, blogging is like writing letters or, in some cases, a journal.

While professional writers do keep journals and write letters (or at least, they used to), those things rarely form the main part of the writer’s oeuvre. They are peripheral, incidental activities—five-finger exercises, so to speak. So, blogging is not Writing with a Capital W, and a blogger is not a Writer in the traditional sense.

Certain bloggers hold themselves up as journalists, demanding and sometimes getting journalists’ credentials. And in fact, some journalistic organizations, hungry for advertising revenues and anxious to reach young audiences, pay their columnists and reporters to maintain blogs. By and large the sponsored bloggoids are not very entertaining, because journalists are not bloggers. And bloggers are not journalists.

Blogging is not journalism. When you write a blog post, you may revise and rewrite it a couple of times (you may not), but whatever you write most certainly will not have to get past an editor. Your last rewrite will not be at the behest of your boss (well, not unless you’re hacking out a pathetic semblance of a blog for the local newspaper or TV station), nor will it come back to you unrecognizable after your editor has taken your words apart and reconstructed them like so many Lego blocks. No one will expect you to fashion your post in the time-honored pyramidal shape of the news article (lead with who-what-when-where-why-how and work downward toward the expendable) or the linear shape of the feature (lead, nut graf, body, wrap). You will not write your post under the eternal tension between Editorial and Advertising: after you write about the cockroach that gamboled across the salad bar down at your local trattoria, you will not find the ad director and the publisher in your office reminding you that your job depends on the $20,000 the trattoria’s proprietor just forked over for a year’s worth of four-color ads in your august publication. Nor will you have your publisher’s lawyer on the phone delivering a lecture on libel and slander.

The nonjournalism of blogging is the very characteristic that gives bloggers their effervescence. It’s what makes a blog fun to write and fun to read. Few bloggers labor under the constraints that have eroded journalism to the point where reporting no longer much matters. Advertisers will pay to place an ad on a page that excoriates the advertiser’s product or service (“just spell the name right!”). Bloggers steal with insouciance; in Blogland copyright is an alien concept. “Truth”—is that a postmodern term? I have to be “fair”? Why? What does that mean, anyway? The blogosphere is a gigantic free-for-all...and therein lies its fascination.

I believe it was Joyce Carol Oates who remarked, in a recent New York Review of Books, that so far bloggers have never attained to the level of art—and so, clearly, they cannot be artists, in either the graphic or the writerly sense. Evidently she had yet to come upon Nobody Here. This site, unarguably a kind of blog, takes linkiness and interactivity to—no doubt about it—high art. I have no idea how many others are out there. As long as we’re being linky, bloggy, and interactive here, how’s about you use a comment to share blogs and blog-like sites that strike you as doing art?

Sarah Boxer’s article on blogging, in the current (February 14, 2008) issue of the NYR of Books, is a little more knowing. Still, her (editor-driven?) need to explain the most basic bloggy concepts to print readers makes her article ring oddly of naïveté and her observations, accurate or not, seem strangely commonplace. She does, though, do a good job of showing why blogging is not Writing, not Journalism. In the end she concludes that “blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can’t fake that. :-)”

WTF, indeed. IMHO, the blog is its own genre, and as a genre it looks a lot like old-fashioned epistolary writing. Even when posts are wholly graphic, they resemble correspondence more than anything else. Dominated by the under-30 set, the blogosphere is, in effect, an engine of letters turbocharged by the power of the hyperlink and running on the high-test gasoline of youth.

                                                        Yrs truly,

                                                                vh

blogging, idle essays