("Why do we blog?", Jill asks. One of my reasons for blogging is to try out ideas in writing. Here is one such post:)
I am pretty convinced it won't do to describe the Web as one medium. Just as print is a technology shared by several media (books, magazines, newspapers), the Web is a shared protocol for several Web media. It just doesn't make sense to say that Amazon is the same medium as this blog, or the New York Times on the Web, or as Heavy.com, or as the Perseus collection.
I am equally convinced that we rely on powerful Web genres, such as
What I am not sure of is where to draw the line between a medium and a genre. What is a blog?
The trouble is that both concepts, medium and genre, are as slippery as a soap bar in the shower. To engineers, a medium is just a technology that transmits. To computer scientists, it is a file format. To McLuhan, it was an "extension of man", a technology that forever "altered our sense-ratio". To Raymond Williams, what McLuhan said was pure rubbish, as a medium is a cultural form, consisting of technology, society, economy, and formal practises. To Bolter and Grusin, "a medium is that which remediates".
A genre could be as big as all our literature, as when Todorov discusses Narrative versus Poetry, or teeny-tiny as when the perky woman in my record store corrects me: "no, that is not jazz, it is Cuban Modern, or Electric Street Funk, or Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough". (OK, she pissed me off. Back on track:) Spaghetti Western is a genre within the Western genre within Narrative Cinema. Star Wars is Science Fiction, but really darn close to both Western and Melodrama and Wagner opera. A genre is thus identified through setting, themes, and structure. Genres overlap, convolute, exist across media or inside media. Genres change through history, so what we now perceive as belonging to one genre may have been seen as something else entirely when it first came out.
Confront Andersja's recent turn-down when applying for an ISSN number. According to the National Library, his blog is a Homepage, not a Periodical.
Are those media or genres, or both?
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What "rest of the world"?
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The Architext