Who Said Blogging Was New?
I have a confession to make: My name is Jacob and I am a history buff. I want to know what life was like before I or anyone else still alive today was born. I don?t just like events and dates; I pore over cultural histories like they?re the greatest things I?ve ever read. I wish I could go back in time just to SEE what life was like. Even if by doing so I upset the space-time continuum and vanished. That being said, I enjoyed our readings this week, especially the sections that were directly related to our present interaction with modern media. I find it fascinating that not much has changed in about 1500 years, except we now have a different means to the same end.
I found it interesting that Garvey referred to scrapbookers in the past tense. For example, she says, ?scrapbook makers themselves USED for their work?? (p. 208). Yet, throughout her article, she continually describes actions and motivations that are still in use today not only in the traditional scrapbooking sense, but in our interactions with the media. Garvey, of course, points out those similarities, but did not point out that it?s not just simply two similar yet essentially different activities, but the exact same activity using a different medium.
Garvey describes scrapbooking as ?gleaning? information from other sources in order to create a new text. She says that the ?gleaner can still create multiple meanings and readings from the text, and can even bake bread from gleaned grain and sell it under the gleaner?s label? (p. 208). In a good number of blogs today, this is exactly what happens. People encounter messages that they think are interesting or worthwhile. Instead of physically cutting and pasting them out of the newspaper, they cut and paste them digitally into a public scrapbook. Garvey says that scrapbooks ?resemble websites, which mingle the link-compiling function of the bookmark with content borrowed without attribution from other websites? (p. 212). While I agree with Garvey, I would take her claims one more step and say that websites don?t resemble scrapbooks, they ARE scrapbooks. If one maintains a blog, it is often in the form of reprinting or reporting what has been found elsewhere, with the addition of some commentary, making us ?textual poachers,? appropriating the message for our own intentions and as our own message.
In recent years, the word scrapbooking itself has changed its meaning. We now think of them as collections of cute stickers and scissors that make funky edges and stenciled messages like ?Way to go!? all stuck next to a cut up photograph of a child holding a plastic trophy. The term scrapbooking has been trivialized and relegated to craft stores and housewives. But the original objective of the activity lives on, thanks to new technological means. Manguel writes that it ?is interesting to note how often a technological development?promotes rather than eliminates that which it is supposed to supersede, making us aware of old-fashioned virtues we might otherwise have either overlooked or dismissed as of negligible importance.? Blogging, in its original form, was literally a list of web sites that one had visited, perhaps with a short commentary or an included clip from the site. As I mentioned above, this is no different from scrapbooking in its original form.
So, what blogging did was to make us aware of and ?old-fashioned? activity that had been trivialized and essentially forgotten. Scrapbooking as a means of collecting scraps had long since been replaced by scrapbooking as photo album decorating ? a technological development brought back our desire to catalog things of interest to us and to make those things our own. It?s a need we have that dates back at least to the creation of commonplace books. Hobart and Schiffman claim that commonplace books, popular at the beginning of the print era, were intended to bring ?together all the knowledge one needed to know? (p. 100). Scrapbooks are not intended to compile everything one needs to know, but they are collections of everything that one CAN know about a certain topic they are interested in. If I operate under the assumption that I can only know information that I have encountered, and a collect a scrap or post a link or copy a quote from everything I encounter on a certain topic, I have created a commonplace scrapbook: everything that I CAN know about that topic.
Technological advances in blogging aren?t the only thing that is not new but simply an extension of previous objectives. Manguel claims that the codex book was developed and became popular in part because it made it ?easier to include glosses and commentaries, allowing the reader a hand in the story.? This became, over the intervening 15 or so centuries, taken for granted. While it is mentioned by Garvey, Maguel, Hobart & Schiffman, and Briggs & Burke, the fact that anyone that reads a book could add commentary and then redistribute the altered work had become somewhat overlooked in print culture.
Lanham and others like to tout the democratizing nature of the Internet and electronic text, saying anyone can be an author, but the reality is these questions have been around for centuries. Briggs and Burke point out that ?transcribers often felt free to add or subtract from the verses they copied?Manuscript was what we would now call an interactive media? (p. 37). Similarly, Hobart and Schiffman discuss the act of ?glossing? or annotating text. These glosses were often shared with others. Garvey says that scrapbooking in the nineteenth century took ?place on the border between reading and authoring? (p. 214). Electronic text, in terms of creating questions of authorship and allowing users to comment upon or even change the meaning of a message, is hardly revolutionary. It is simply a technological advance that has made us aware of an old-fashioned virtue: that we all have the right and ability to alter or comment upon the work of another.
Garvey claims that ?scrapbooks endorse an ideal not of originality, but of reuse and recirculation, of making the old continually new? (p. 214). As I noted at the beginning of this post, I am a history buff. I will read almost anything historical. And what I have learned is that there is, please excuse the cliché, nothing new under the sun. Among those not new things is electronic text. As I?ve tried to show in this post, it is simply a different means to the same end ? an end we?ve been striving for for at least 1500 years.