Blogging: personal advertisement
Since the mid-‘90s it has been possible to stumble (or click?) upon blogs while online. Yet, it seems like blogs are proliferating every second. I hope that doesn’t make the situation seem dire – unlike nuclear weaponry, blogs are nothing to fear. And unlike newsgroups (alt.music.smash-pumpkins was so 8 years ago), the interest isn’t dwindling.
Blogging has a lot in common with the Futurists. That is to say, they were all about spreading their art everywhere through modern advertising. And can we say blogging is not a personal advertisement?
No, we can’t. Today, blogging is first-person, self-centered, persuasive activity. A blog is, above all, a medium out to sell you something. If you need proof, just check out myspace; the site allows users (all 65588 billion of them) to network, send messages, and look at each other. One of the key features is the built-in blog. If you’re looking to myspace for companionship, you’re selling your personality in a page. And what better complements your sultry pictures than ruminations? (By ruminations, I mean writing that ponders a topic, not the act of chewing cud. Sorry for the confusion.)
Serious scholarly work by anthropologists has been done on the topic. So don’t take it from me, the English major with a multimedia design minor. In his article “My Blog is Me”, which appeared in the journal Ethnos, Adam Reed explores the role of the blog;
“Just like a paper diary, weblogs are structured around ‘I’ narratives. They present the life of a sovereign subject who has a continuous identity and a coherent history (as one blogger told me, weblogs are ‘the great I am.’) (226).
That concludes today’s rumination: no matter what they may claim, a blogger is selling you something, be it theory, rhetoric, products or themselves.
Blogging has a lot in common with the Futurists. That is to say, they were all about spreading their art everywhere through modern advertising. And can we say blogging is not a personal advertisement?
No, we can’t. Today, blogging is first-person, self-centered, persuasive activity. A blog is, above all, a medium out to sell you something. If you need proof, just check out myspace; the site allows users (all 65588 billion of them) to network, send messages, and look at each other. One of the key features is the built-in blog. If you’re looking to myspace for companionship, you’re selling your personality in a page. And what better complements your sultry pictures than ruminations? (By ruminations, I mean writing that ponders a topic, not the act of chewing cud. Sorry for the confusion.)
Serious scholarly work by anthropologists has been done on the topic. So don’t take it from me, the English major with a multimedia design minor. In his article “My Blog is Me”, which appeared in the journal Ethnos, Adam Reed explores the role of the blog;
“Just like a paper diary, weblogs are structured around ‘I’ narratives. They present the life of a sovereign subject who has a continuous identity and a coherent history (as one blogger told me, weblogs are ‘the great I am.’) (226).
That concludes today’s rumination: no matter what they may claim, a blogger is selling you something, be it theory, rhetoric, products or themselves.
posted by KK at 3:45 PM
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