Blogging as relationship and conversation

In his important review essay on blogging and education, long time edublogger Stephen Downes (2004) urges us to think of blogging as “something defined by format and process, not by content.” He continues:

A blog, therefore, is and has always been more than the online equivalent of a personal journal. Though consisting of regular (and often dated) updates, the blog adds to the form of the diary by incorporating the best features of hypertext: the capacity to link to new and useful resources. But a blog is also characterized by its reflection of a personal style, and this style may be reflected in either the writing or the selection of links passed along to readers. Blogs are, in their purest form, the core of what has come to be called personal publishing.

A blog is personal publishing not just in the sense of its expressive or emotional or idiosyncratic tone but also in the sense that it operates at the core of a personal network or set of personal relationships. Downes quotes Meg Hourihan (2002) to this effect:

Whether you’re a warblogger who works by day as a professional journalist or you’re a teenage high school student worried about your final exams, you do the same thing: you use your blog to link to your friends and rivals and comment on what they’re doing. Blog posts are short, informal, sometimes controversial, and sometimes deeply personal, no matter what topic they approach.

Oliver Wrede (2003) expresses this slightly differently. He begins by emphasising that blogs create a particular form of authorship:

Weblogs are not special because of their technology but because of the practice and authorship they shape. And it is a practice that will require a weblog author to be connected to processes, discourses and communities.

He goes on to specify this:

Weblogs combine two oppositional principles: monologue and dialogue. A reaction to a statement is not only directed to the sender but also to unknown readers. Very often the weblogger gets feedback from unexpected sources: new relations and contexts emerge. This (assumed) undirected communication develops to an open and involving activity.

Weblogs not only enable interaction with other webloggers, they offer a way to engage in a discursive exchange with the author's self (intrapersonal conversation). A weblog becomes an active partner in communication, because it demands consistent criteria for what will be posted to a weblog (and how). This “indirect monologic dialog” of weblogs allows us to conduct communicative acts that otherwise would only be possible in very particular circumstances.

Lilia Efimova and Aldo de Moor (2005) in a very interesting analysis of weblog conversations make a similar point:

Unlike other tools that support conversations, weblogs provide their authors with a personal space simultaneously with a community space. As a result, at any given time a blogger is involved in two types of conversations: (1) conversations with self and (2) conversations with others.

In the simplest case, a weblog post is fully and only embedded into "a conversation with self", a personal narrative used to articulate and to organise one’s own thinking. A single blogger could have several of such conversations simultaneously, returning to ideas over time. Next, each of the posts can trigger a conversation with others that can take several rounds of discussions as well.

The personal conversation or the monologic aspect of blogging can be simply left to grow spontaneously or we can learn to work with a blog as an evolving hypertext essay by thoughtfully linking backwards and forwards to our own as well as other's posts. In fact new software plug-ins encourage this type of practice by allowing authors to display a series of related-post-links with each entry.

Part of the freedom of blogging is its immediacy and its flexibility: it is a space where anything from brief notes, first thoughts and links, to more worked-up essay style postings can live together. However deeper dimensions are discovered if we actively mine this archive gradually shaping it through addition and juxtaposition.

Similarly the communal or dialogic aspects of the blogging-conversation are multidimensional. At the most fundamental level blogs are developed through an immersion in the ecology of the link, which situates our authorship in relation to other texts and other authors. Comments, traffic patterns, blogroll and pings develop this into an even broader conversation. Just as actively mining our own archive and adding a set of related-post links enriches our monologic conversation, active deployment of techniques such as RSS aggregation and the formation of group blogs can extend the social/communal dimensions of the blogging conversation.

From: O’Donnell, M., 2005, "Blogging as pedagogic practice: artefact and ecology," Blog Talk Downunder, 19-21 May 2005, Sydney, Australia. (Download pdf)