I’m going to answer “Yes” to my question, and here’s why.
A lot of the news about blogs is about two key features of blogging …. two-wayness and voice … that are the outcomes of sociology meeting technology head on.
Both attributes are the results of communication and sharing attempts at making meaning using a medium that didn’t really exist for most people only 15 years ago.
Information architecture, basic web site technology and the infrastructure of the Internet have all sufficiently advanced such that blogging is becoming able to combine all three to let individuals connect and exchange via personal publishing … of text, images, voice and video.
I’ve consistently noticed over the past three years how and what I felt when reading other peoples’ blog, when considering the ebbs, flows, insights, resolutions and other arcana of my relationship with blogging, and when engaged in dialogue with others via the Comments section of their blogs and on my blog.
When listening to other peoples’ voices … I look at sentence structures, I notice style, I read woop-ass phrases with delight, I marvel, shake my head and sigh when i go through some of the truly brilliant material I have seen (there are some real genius people out there … amazing). I make the conscious decision, from time to time, to give a full 30 minutes or hour (or two) to go through other peoples’ material … and this involves feeling whether i am ready to shift my body position, slow down and concentrate … attend.
Some people blog light and positive, some people literally hurl invective … others satirize, in different styles … you learn to look for the smirk, or the knowing wink, or the shared nod of understanding and reflection. Colours matter, and the cleanliness or delicacy or whimsy or banality of the font, the spacing … the blogger who writes deliciously and with long sentences, having fun … or the inspired, organic use of photos.
Two-wayness … this is a type of interaction that is truly different, I think, than talking with someone else on the phone, or speaking to them face to face. In both those cases, the evidence of what was communicated and exchanged evapoartes, if you will, unless recorded. The two-way exchange via a blog post and comments, or the more general two-wayness of links, has persistence (as many have noted before), and the process of creating, sending and receiving the information is also quite different. Organizing thoughts and speaking, either formally or informally, is very different from typing and posting words and images to ocnvey one’s message and meaning. And this persistent, always accessible two-wayness creates meaning in and of itself – the medium becomes part of the meaning created
Comments … some make you angry, or resigned to the stupidity and viciousness of trolls … some take your breath away, and lift you up, either through empathy and a felt senes of understanding and respect .. or equally, through a robust challenge to one or another assertion you may have made. The way a host responds to a range of comments, questions, challenges, and attacks can be very revealing, and I swear one can feel the calmness, or the brusque charm of an opinionated expert, or the anger or sadness in another person’s expression of their care and concern.
You get physically involved, sometimes … often ? … with the process of blogging, typing faster when your’re clear and excited, slowly and more deliberately or more vaguely, when you’re thinking or just scratching your ass and looking out the window.
Working with and in blogs makes you sometimes want to get together with other people who share this somewhat unusual but “you-know-it’s-so-natural-too” hobby of blogging. And so of course you notice outbreaks, sometimes, of people who live in a certain regional area getting together for drinks, or the phenomenon of Bloggercons and Foo Camps and Poptechs and Supernovas and SXSWs that have popped up in the past fiuve years – the sociality that is more and more accompanying the use of interconnected social technologies in this era. And of course there was a great deal of empassioned, high-engagement blogging work involved in the last three years of political campaigning that we’ve all ived through.
Doing this makes me feel social, and some of my readers may know that I’ve actually gone about meeting quite a few bloggers over the past three years – in the USA, the UK, France, Holland, and Germany, and across Canada. I enjoy meeting these new people who feel like friends already, because they have been writing and posting what it is that makes them who they are, and so I feel like I know them somewhat already … a basic threshold of trust has been established.
Other bloggers’ writing style and tone, syntax, degree of focus, diversity and other factors all combine to often give me a feeling of being able to feel the other persons’ presence coming through that which I see, read, observe and ponder. So I think you can feel other peoples’ blogs, yes.
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