The Introduction

I first read about blogs in Newsweek of all places. After 9/11, I devoured the enormous amounts of news coverage devoted to the terrorist attacks, the causes, the response, the stories of the victims, the hijackers, all the major players. After awhile, however, the regular news coverage wasn’t satisfying, I started exploring other avenues for more in-depth stories, or new perspectives, or something different from what I began to see as repetitive information constantly being reported in newspapers and magazines. I was looking for different narratives.

I found Instapundit.com , a blog run by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at University of Tennessee. His blog is composed of short entries, with hyperlinks to articles or other blog posts, normally with a few specific comments or a joke. Nearly overnight, it felt like I had found a massive new database of information. More importantly, I found that I could search based on different criteria. With traditional print newspapers, I could read a couple of sections – the front page, the international news, the sports, the arts/entertainment sections. In cyberspace, I could search out articles published around the world on Islamic terrorism, or any subject I wanted to read about. Reynolds and many other bloggers, it turned out, were also interested in 9/11 and America’s relationship with the Muslim world. Bloggers would link up stories from Australian papers, British papers, Israeli papers, Al Jazeera, AND, most interestingly, from people living in Iraq, serving in Afghanistan, or foreign policy experts blogging about foreign affairs.

For awhile I read blogs without commenting, navigating through a much wider range of information than a local newspaper, and experiencing a higher level of immersion. The immersion factor was due to the personalities behind the blogs themselves. There was no shame about promoting a particular ideology and no claim for objective reporting. It is commonly acknowledged that a blog reflects a personality of a lone blogger or group of bloggers. This acknowledgement made the experience more honest and realistic than reading or listening to “objective” news reports. The blogosphere is a discurtive community. Ideas are thrown around loosely and sometimes recklessly. People respond immediately by adding a new thought or to point out elements of an argument they found wrong or faulty. When I first became immersed in blogs, I felt like I had entered a heated college dorm room discussion with students, professors, and professionals, from all over the world. I wanted to join in, so I started a blog.

My blog has become a part of two parallel communities in cyberspace. The first community is the larger blogosphere of “blogger rock stars” the Instapundit, Andrew Sullivan, Virginia Postrel, etc., blogs that get hundreds of thousands of visitors a day. I read most of their posts, often linking to their stories, much like one would read a columnist or a publication. Our relationship is not reciprocal, however, they do not read my blog posts, nor respond to my comments.

The other community is a local community of bloggers, friends and colleagues who blog about more local issues, film students, film professors, friends from home, etc. This can be a rich discussion because there is a back and forth, many comments and interlinking between each others blogs. We become readers and writers, often responding to each others posts and challenging each others beliefs and sharing information and expertise in our own area of future employment: entertainment.

Blogging has become a hip phenomemnon in the past couple of years and I enjoy spending my free time blogging. No one blogs for money, even all of the large bloggers have “day jobs” as writers, editors, professors, or professionals. Part of the fun of the blogging is that it started as and remains, a hobby.

This paper will explore the appeal of blogging, how the pleasures measure up to other activities with narrative consequences, like reading novels, newspapers, or watching television and movies. We will look at blogging both as a medium and as a genre. As a medium, blogging is defined by the technology and format of common blogging software. As a genre, we will examine the different types of blogs: Punditry, Personal journal, and the associated subgenres, the Warblog, Research Archive, Photojournal, etc. We will use blogging as an example of narrative mixing with new media and computer “rules.” Lastly, we will explore the consequences, what is at stake when we talk about narrative and new media and how blogs shape the way we understand narratives about the world around us.