blogging

Blogs (also known as web logs) are web pages in which dated entries appear in reverse chronological order, so that the reader views the most recently written entries first. Blogs emerged as a web genre in the late 1990s, and as simple and free publishing tools became available at the turn of the twenty-first century, blogging activity has increased exponentially. Since anyone with an Internet connection can publish a blog, the quality of writing on blogs can vary considerably, and blogs may be written about diverse subjects and for many diff fferent purposes. Blogs can be diff fferentiated according to their function, as knowledge-management tools, which filter information, or personal blogs, which are used to document and refl flect on the blogger’s life history. Both types of blog are highly varied and hybrid genres. Personal blogs are infl fluenced by online forms of communication such as e-mail and personal web pages, along with offl ffline genres of life history, particularly diary writing and autobiography. Filter blogs have their antecedents in bulletin boards and Listservs. Blogs can also be categorized according to their topic or relevance to a par ticular interest group. Examples of the genre include blogs written about travel, health, politics, sex, legal matters, and cookery, alongside blogs written for professional purposes on behalf of corporations or as part of educational practice.

(Johns Hopkins University Press)

There are numerous essays and reviews on German-language electronic literature, which run from the mid nineties to the present day. Most of these texts, however, are written in German – a language that is no longer accepted and common as an universal language for science.

In order to present the overview of German language electronic literature, we filtered out some historical lines that may explain better how the development of individual genres came about. A good starting point may be the very first experiments of authors with computers to generate electronic poetry, a subject the international community mostly agrees upon.

The following model of historical lines of development is suggested:

• Concrete Experiments
• Collaborative Writing and Authoring Environments
• Hypertext: From Hyperfiction to Net Literature
• Code Works
• Blogging and more  

A historical analysis shows that these  five lines of net literature are based upon two prior German strands going back to philosophical, poetical and artistic experiments in the 1960s: On the one hand, the Stuttgart School by Max Bense with exponents Reinhard Döhl and Theo Lutz, the latter producing a first example of digital poetry in 1959. On the other hand, the computer graphics experiments of 1960 and the punched-card linker projects by artists Kurd Alsleben and Antje Eske in Hamburg.

• Stuttgart School or Group (Bense/Döhl/Lutz etc.) > Stochastic Texts
• Hypertext/ Mutuality (Alsleben, Eske) > Computer Graphics, Linker

 The presentation for ELO Paris 2013 introduces this model of lineage for the development of German-language electronic literature. Taking time- and textspace constraints in consideration, the foucus is set on the strand „I Stuttgart School“ and the line „1. Concrete Experiments“. For all other lines the sympathetic reader finds  descriptions and historical examples in the essay „From Theo Lutz to Netzliteratur“ in Cybertext Yearbook 2012.

 The presenter has been part of the net literature community that spans Germany, Austria and Switzerland as a researcher, publisher and artist for twenty years.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2013 ELO Conference: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/lineages-german-lang…)

The Mirror and the Veil offers a unique perspective on the phenomenon of online personal diaries and blogs. Blending insights from literary criticism, from psychoanalytical theory and from social sciences, Viviane Serfaty identifies the historical roots of self-representational writing in America and studies the original features it has developed on the Internet. She perceptively analyzes the motivations of bloggers and the repercussions their writings may have on themselves and on American society at large. This book will be of interest to specialists in American Studies, to students in literature, communication, psychology and sociology, as well as to anyone endeavoring to understand the new set of practises created by Internet users in America. --Publisher description.

Thoroughly revised and updated, this new edition of Blogging provides an accessible study of a now everyday phenomenon and places it in a historical, theoretical and contemporary context. The second edition takes into account the most recent research and developments and provides current analyses of new tools for microblogging and visual blogging. Jill Walker Rettberg discusses the ways blogs are integrated into today’s mainstream social media ecology, where comments and links from Twitter and Facebook may be more important than the network between blogs that was significant five years ago, and questions the shift towards increased commercialization and corporate control of blogs. The new edition also analyses how smart phones with cameras and social media have led a shift towards more visual emphasis in blogs, with photographs and graphics increasingly foregrounded. Authored by a scholar-blogger, this engaging book is packed with examples that show how blogging and related genres are changing media and communication. It gives definitions and explains how blogs work, shows how blogs relate to the historical development of publishing and communication and looks at the ways blogs structure social networks.

Through the analysis of three case-studies, I investigate what happens to blogs when they are transposed outside the web, in media such as printed books or ebooks. Starting from Walker-Rettberg's definition of blog (2008), three orders of change are identified: blog's life and function; author's life and role; blog's structure and content. These three levels open the discussion to gender and genre issues with reference to digital texts and to the possibility that, far from sealing the death of the author or the onnipotence of the reader, the web opens texts to emancipation.