However good a home page you have, and however nice a
collection of pages you’ve “published” on a non-blog website, it’s
unlikely that you could establish yourself the reputation and regular
readership that some authors have established by blogging.
The people who would immediately say “I read Pisani’s
blog” if
asked are more likely to say “I’ve seen your site” or “I visited your
site,.” So, although bloggers are not identified overtly as authors the
way that electronic literature authors often are, I would argue that
blogging establishes a similar place for them as writing a book does
for an author.
The concept of an author of "literature blog" rely on
traditional notions of an author in some ways, and yet challenge those
notions in other ways. I believe that by creating electronic literature
and by blogging, one can become not only an author but, for lack of a
better term, a new media author, a digital author, or an electronic
author.
These activities can provide a medium to write literature:
The
status of an author
These activities are electronic writing,
but they do not tend to give one the status of an author in the same
way. To completely answer the question of why there are some types of
computer writing and online communication that make one into an author,
while other forms do not, will require more work which excedes the aim
of this overview.
There are ways to show that online communities
do confer author status and recognition upon some
types of writers. These authors can be measured by the number of
readings to their post, or the number of visitors to his blog or by the
number of search engines' referrals.
Also, posts messages in his blog from readers are a good
indication of readers acceptance of his work as an author. Is like
being expossed openly to critics "the public" who will be quite sincere
and sometimes well prepared. They can comment his work without
reserves, create links to his blog, refer quotations in their
webs/blogs, etc.
The activity of these writers is not monolithic. Some of it
involves web design and promotion, careful editing and revision; other
sorts of authorial activity do not necessarily involve these, but
entail keeping current with other online writing and cultivating a community that
manifests itself in writing.
Promotion
Becoming a known author in internet presents some
challenges:
- Raders find difficult reading long chunks of text on the
screen.
- The work is inmediately available to the public, and authors face the
fear of being copied.
- The reading public are reluctant to accept the idea of
literary experience on the computer.
- Editors often
are inextricably tied to the printed page, the symbol of literature for
them.
On the other hand authors
became known precisely because of their promotion due
internet. Weblogs offer to novel authors a good test
field for their work, and more important, blogs provide a good
feed-back from readers.
Much of the
fun of weblogs is that they go wildly in unexpected directions, and so
their literature.
They are also personality-driven, and the personal is often a welcome
(and appropriate) touch when reading literature.
Finally blogs present a
double-edged sword of online publishing:
- work is available
immediately all over the world for free, but there is
(almost always) no traditional publisher to oversee one’s work, promote
it, and lend credibility to one’s efforts.
Their
work
Weblogs have proliferated all across the
Internet in the past few years --
an increase from some 30,000 blogs in 1998 to 500,000 by mid-2002
according to Cameron Marlow, who
runs blogdex, which tracks them. His survey appeared in a recent article in The Economist.
These rates of blogs give us an idea of the literary production
that can be created in blogs.
But, are they literary pieces,
According to the
Complete Review Quarterly :
"There are, in
fact, a considerable number of reading diaries to be
found on the Internet, but most of these are a more limited sort of
weblog, focussing only on commentary and rarely offering links to
external pages and sites (one of the hallmarks -- and most useful
aspects -- of weblogs)."
