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January 04, 2005
When the Audience bites back
Sherry over at Stay of Execution has had an interesting "discussion" with a reader who only identifies himself as "Whomever." In comments, Whomever demanded that Sherry tell her readership about her current job prospects and explain how she has managed to stay afloat since quitting her job as an attorney in a small Portland, ME law firm six months ago. Sherry responded with this post.
What I find most amazing about this incident is not just the audacity of Whomever, but what it says about the persona that Sherry has created on her blog. She has convinced Whomever that she is explicitly telling us about herself in every detail. She has convinced at least one reader that she is so faithfully representing herself on her blog that she is in some way lying to her readership by not giving them more insight into her current job/employment status/financial situation. She convinced Whomever (and probably some significantly less rude others) that she was carefully plotting out her life and unreeling it bit by bit on the blog for her audiences enjoyment, rather than as a chronicle of selected parts of the daily act of living.
What Whomever reveals about himself is that he is most definitely not a blogger (though most definitely an asshat). If he was, he would understand how a blog is a personal enterprise that is explicitly controlled by the author. A blog is not a "the customer is always right" space, place (or what ever other loaded metaphor you want to use.) Like a novel, you don't write to the author and demand he change the part you don't like, you just stop reading. Blogs are a bit more confusing for the unindoctrinated, because they suggest interactivity, conversation and feel to many like an intimate space. Sherry in particular does an excellent job of making her readers feel like they are sitting on her rooster couch, and hearing snippets of her life as she goes about her daily business.
Mollie, a commenter, put it well when she wrote "Yes, she has an audience, but an audience can't demand a performer change their choreography. If they don't like it, they can leave. The audience is just along for the ride."
Recently in conversation Sherry used an excellent metaphor for blogging--one that works for her and which I find quite appealing as well--the metaphor of the mosaic--the blog as an amalgam of small bright or meaningful bits from a full life. When you step back, they form a picture of a person, but close up you realize that you're only getting small tiles of specific selected experiences, rather than a complete unbroken painting of one person's life. I like that the metaphor includes the idea that the blog is personal creation--art. And that while a blog may be a true picture of a person by necessity it is not complete.
Another blogger I've interviewed for my thesis brought up the point that we manage our identities in public interactions too. We don't show the same person to our spouse that we show to our PTA subcommittee or our co-workers or the local scout troop selling cookies. So there's probably not one "true" persona for any person--just an amalgam of various public and private selves. The blog expresses just one version, a public and partial one.
January 4, 2005 at 06:13 PM | Permalink
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Ms Feverish, who is studying blogs and bloggers posts the eloquent suggestion that blogging is new form of expression - a new personal art form. [Read More]
Tracked on Jan 4, 2005 9:03:51 PM
Comments
A great post, ms feverish, and quite clarifying for me.
Posted by: win | Jan 4, 2005 7:45:06 PM
Not even the most thorough and frank autobiography can paint a complete picture of the author. I'm betting that even Whomever knows that, and is quite aware of not getting every detail of Sherry's life. The source of Whomever's question is probably not ignorance, but rudeness -- and perhaps typical "whatever generation" obliviousness to the feelings and boundaries of others.
Of course, in the situation you've highlighted, it doesn't help that Sherry offers every week to answer virtually any question posed by her readership.
To the extent that you're saying, however, that to be a weblogger you must be attempting some form of art, I can't fully agree. A weblog is a technology for communicating, the possible uses and types of content are limitless.
Posted by: David Giacalone | Jan 4, 2005 10:40:58 PM
Sure, David, colored paints are a technology, too, and can be used for all kinds of seemingly non-artistic endeavors, many of which are useful.
That doesn't mean that painting isn't an art form. True, a certain amount of intent and skill must be brought to the enterprise.
We all have a lot to learn about what to do with this medium. I think this post points out how helpful it is for us to remember that the blog is, at the very least, potentially an art form, if we have the intent and acquire the skill...
Posted by: win | Jan 5, 2005 9:29:30 AM
win: most people taking up colored paints are at least trying to make art and the question becomes whether they've succeeded. Weblogs are, I believe, far more like printing presses or the telephone -- we cannot assume that the "speaker" is aiming at art. Some are and succeed admirably, some have totally different goals.
Posted by: David Giacalone | Jan 5, 2005 9:40:26 AM
I agree, David, that Sherry does invite a greater sense of interactivity and responsiveness to her readers than other bloggers, but nevertheless, I think most of us do not suffer under the illusion that she answers every question she gets--I fully expect that Sherry is highly selective in what she chooses to answer.
As for the blog being an art form, I think it gets back to how a person practices blogging. For the creatively inclined, the deliberate, the blog may very well be a form of art in their mind as well as the mind of their readers. For others it may simply be an expressive "tool." We still use also sorts of "technologies" to make art (as Win points out) and I would argue that anyone can make art, and that there is no "success" with art--only meaning.
It makes me think of when I visited China with my friend A. We were in a temple complex in Nanjing, and had stopped in one of the many tiny shops adjacent to the temple. My friend A. is a scholar of chinese art, so when I looked at a scroll that I liked, I asked her if it was any good. Her response: "Do you like it?" The intent in her response being that it doesn't matter whether it is good by standards set up by academics or the art world. I wasn't consuming the art as an investment, I was contemplating buying it as a physical remembrance of our trip, and as some thing that would give me pleasure in looking at it as well as from the memories it would carry.
I personally like the blogs that I read, and I do consider them a form of art, even if the person who creates them does not.
Posted by: Ms Feverish | Jan 5, 2005 11:12:10 AM
In most of my discussions about blogging, the non-blogger, non-blog readers I am talking to want to know _why_ people blog and just _what_ a blog IS, dammit! This seemingly inherent and very strong impulse to define things in concrete terms strikes me everytime. While I myself am someone who appreciates decisive, satisfying, definitions and boundaries, when it comes to blogs, I appreciate their slippery, evasive quality -- they way they are often situated between qualifiers we usually use to define things (private/public, fictional/real, etc.). The very lack of definition surrounding blogs and what they _ought_ to be, is one of the things that's most exciting about the medium. Most interesting to me (and highlighted by the conversation at civpro)is the way that blogs facilitate a unique intersection of public and private. It becomes apparent that we as readers aren't used to or prepared to tackle this unmediated intersection when people like "whomever" want to know very personal, very real details of a blogger's life (indicating that they assume the blog is fact and not fiction), while at the same time discussing the blog as something akin to a novel with the blogger as an omniscient narrator/character --- seemingly forgetting that life doesn't have a neat ending (or a predetermined one, as does a finished novel).
Posted by: Emily | Jan 5, 2005 12:55:11 PM
This thought is still rather unformed, but in relation the discussion about the potential for blog as art, I can't help but thinking about the epistolary form, where the "use of the letter's formal properties is used to create meaning", and where narratives, and/or word play, and other literary devices are an element of the final product. And whether a letter transcends to art, which as Ms. Feaverish suggests implies only that it has meaning, is left up readers.
Posted by: Emily | Jan 5, 2005 2:21:36 PM
How absolutely amusing. Yet again I am accused of bad manners and audacity for doing nothing more than asking a question that was invited, if implictly, by the recepient. My question was not an attempt to delve into the most intimate parts of that woman's life. Nor do I believe that any blogger is revealing every portion of his or her life. Sherry started a blog that was telling a story, and it was a fairly interesting one. She reflected on her work, and how that affected her thoughts and life. She spoke occassionally about hobbies, and frequently about colleges or law firms. Nonetheless, it was a story. Then, without warning, it stopped. She quits her job and starts posting about flowers and throwing out her old shoes. I find it unbelievable that people have found my questions rude or intrusive, when I simply asked for a continuation of what had once been the norm, or at the least, some definite post that the nature of the story had shifted. Oh, and this art for art's sake, and the audience not dictating to the author is ridiculous and naive. True, I could just stop reading, but it is also perfectly reasonable to ask questions. As for the art thing, the point of writing is communicating. You can have all of the self-indulgent thoughts or "art" that you would like, but you need not write them down. If you choose to do so, you do it for others, not yourself.
Posted by: Whomever | Jan 5, 2005 4:09:24 PM
Perhaps it has not occured to Whomever that in fact, posting about flowers and throwing away old shoes is part of the story? Maybe not as you construct it, but part of the story that Sherry tells of her life?
As for writing and art, I would suggest that sometimes the point of writing is to seem that you are communicating, rather than actually doing so.
And if you're really shocked by the reaction you've gotten, I think you need to take another look at the language you've used in your comments. Rather than supporting your statements with evidence, you are simply stating beliefs, and attacking other authors with inflammatory and derogatory words like "ridiculous," "naive" and "self-indulgent." You can chuck that stuff around as much as you like, but it isn't going to win you any friends or any respect.
Posted by: Ms. Feverish | Jan 5, 2005 7:40:25 PM
Ms. Feverish is right to suggest that Whomever take a look at his language. His comments repeatedly denigrate the author of Stay of Execution for not having a job, and clearly show his outmoded value system that considers all activity besides paid work as inferior, even dismissing it altogether as "nothing." Here are a few examples: "I can't comprehend a human being doing absolutely nothing for such a long period of time." He asks how Scheherazade can "cease to post on anything substantive for months." And "Who can manage this sort of drifting?"
Whomever has revealed his values loud and clear. Anything short of a job, say family, volunteerism, taking courses, going to conferences, organizing conferences, supporting friends, fulltime parenting, being a mentor, etc. is insubstantial, drifting, and "nothing."
Sounds like Whomever ought to open his own Anonymous Lawyer blog, creating a persona who lives at the office and judges all others who don't, "losers." Except Whomever wouldn't have to create a persona, seeing as this is him through and through.
Posted by: ML | Jan 9, 2005 4:32:59 PM
