"What's the difference between weblogs and journals?", Helen Whitehead asked. "Blogging is a social, public act. Scribbling on paper in your back room isn't, unless your mom finds your diary", Mark Bernstein replied.
Just as important, however, is another question: "what is the difference between weblogs and Web newspapers?". Or this question: "what is the difference between weblogs and a column?". Among the answers to both, I think, are:
Blogs appear to be somewhere between journals, news, and columns. Many a blog post is a "dear diary moment". Blogging from a conference needn't be much different from wired.com's coverage of the same event. And I read several blogs that frequently carry posts just as insightful as a newspaper column.
We understand any text from its ties and affinities to all earlier texts. Often, we call this "belonging to a genre", and that is OK if we view genres as flexible, overlapping, more like gravitational fields than nations with borders. Any text belongs to more than one genre. But I think Genette is more accurate when he describes the relations as an architextual field, where texts of a similar genre are closer, but any text has some relation to our given text.
In order to understand complex things, we need to recognise them as belonging to a preestablished category, at least at first. This is exactly the point of Umberto Eco's Kant and the Platypus. When whities arrived in Australia and saw the platypus, they had to describe it as similar to some animals they had seen before. A beaver, perhaps. Or a duck. Probably both, and some more. A text (a novel, a film, a record, a TV show) is a complex thing, and we always immediately try to categorise it, so that we know how to react to it. Remember Twin Peaks? Much of the delight of the series (at least the first dozen episodes, which were good) was that we didn't really know wether to laugh, be frightened, or to solve a crime. Many people didn't get that, so they didn't like the show.
(It's probably the same thing happening when I don't get why grown-ups watch Buffy.)
We understand things from what they are not. Orange is not red, not yellow. Two centuries ago, that colour had no name in the Norwegian language. An orange (the fruit) would have to be described as either red or yellow. I am told that in Russian, they see two different colours in the range we just know as blue.
Weblogs aren't exactly journals, news, columns. But in some ways, they are similar. When we map their affinities, we understand what they are themselves. "The architext is always about the other text", Genette explains.
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