On The Importance Of Blogging – Part II

Yesterday I wrote, in Part I of this series, that I would expand a little on the idea of applying syntactic and pragmatic weight and structure to private semantics, and how that applies to how I think about blogging.

In many ways, blogging is, as Claude Lévi-Strauss would call it; bricolage, and most bloggers, especially link bloggers, can be rightly called bricoleurs. Here I use bricolage in the strict sense of Lévi-Strauss:

“…dialogue with the materials and means of execution.”

(Lévi-Strauss 1974, 29)

and also with regards to the choices and options for expresssion afforded an author by their choice of materials (journal vs. blog, WordPress vs. Movable Type, etc…)

the use of the medium can be expressive. In such a dialogue, the materials which are ready-to-hand may (as we say) ‘suggest’ adaptive courses of action, and the initial aim may be modified. Consequently, such acts of creation are not purely instrumental: the bricoleur ‘”speaks” not only with things… but also through the medium of things’

(ibid., 21)

However, not every writer acts or feels like a bricoleur. Individuals differ strikingly in their responses to the notion of media transformation. They range from those who insist that they are in total control of the media which they ‘use’ to those who experience a profound sense of being shaped by the media which ‘use’ them (Chandler 1995).

These thoughts, as they relate to creating content for the web, have haunted me for a long time, and I have tried to approach them from many different angles. I spent quite a bit of time running down the thought that all web content producers, and especially bloggers, were bricoleurs, piecing together narrative arcs from whatever materials were available to them. I even tagged one of my previous websites as “Found-Object Web Design” in homage to this idea.

Ferdinand de Saussure posited that

Normally we do not express ourselves by using single linguistic signs, but groups of signs, organised in complexes which themselves are signs.

(Saussure 1983, 127), (Saussure 1974, 128)

By a simple extrapolation, one can move quickly from Saussure’s notice of constructions and of discourse as signs equal to the individual words to the idea that a corpus of posts represents as much of a sign as does an individual entry. Of course, in the context of blogging, that is really as far as we can go with Saussure, given his focus on the language system rather than on its use. Discourse was neglected in Saussures work, so nothing further can be gleaned from him on the idea of corpus as semiotic sign.

We must turn to others (e.g. Hodge & Kress 1988) to explore a more socially-oriented semiotics that concerns itself primarily with ‘discourse’. it is useful to combine such a social theory of criticism with the concept of intertextuality, as introduced by Julia Kristeva. Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69) through shared codes, which every text and every reading depend on.

Tomorrow, in part III, I will explain why I believe Kristiva’s ideas are the best way to view the web, and to understand why blogging is important. Along the way, I will show why I believe that Dave Winer is wrong.