It's so startling to think that it's been nearly eight months, by my poor mathematical reckoning, since I've written a blog post. Of course, such gaps call into question the necessity for the existence of the blog itself. So, in that spirit (and because I've been teaching about morphology), I've decided to write about the word 'blog.'
The well-known explanation of 'blog' that it represents a clipped form of the compound 'weblog.' In its original form, computer logs were simply collections of log-in data: who accessed files and when. When discussion boards went into web-based form, html recorded discussions started taking this log form, and then it spiraled out of control. Of course, this is seriously simplified version of the history of the 'blog.' A well-researched and documented explanation appears on a blog about blogs (which reminds me that I need to write about 'meta' as a verb form) provides a much longer and fuller picture of their history.
But my question is really about these personal blogs: public diaries that gain an audience. The blog has called into question the nature of new media (is unfiltered, unedited content truly authoritative--and should we long for authority anymore anyway) as well as the nature of privacy. Even if blogs really seem to be read by niche groups (one's Facebook friends and the like), what does it mean when we write something incendiary? If we don't intend harm, but harm happens anyway, what responsibility does the blogger have?
Now, I find it unlikely, as a comparatively private person who values the effect of the well-told narrative, that I would ever disclose such things. But what is my responsibility as a reader of blogs? If a blogger reveals too much, should I pretend the text doesn't exist, in the same way I ignore the existence of Twilight or bad Harlequin romance novels? Obviously, my attempt to ignore them has failed, since I can still name them. But perhaps their insertion into this discussion reveals something significant, from a psychoanalytic perspective. Perhaps one problem of the blog emerges from its original compound: as a "log," does a weblog create expectations of a particular kind in its readers.
Consider the OED definition for log, n 1, 7d: "Any record in which facts about the progress or performance of something are entered in the order in which they become known; e.g. (a) a record of what is found, or how some property varies, at successive depths in drilling a well; a graph or chart displaying this information; (b) a record kept by a lorry driver in which details of journeys are noted; (c) a record kept of what is broadcast by a radio or television station from moment to moment."
A log, as is clear from this definition, records objectively verifiable information. It tells, in an empirical sense, the truth.
But no matter our faith in a narrator, readers never expect a story about oneself to be entirely and completely true. As Bakhtin says, every hero is his own ideologue: he expresses his own truth, damn all the others. So perhaps the word 'blog,' having been clipped so unceremoniously from its original compound, has taken on a fictive connotation. The 'blog' is a new genre: extemporaneous, perhaps, but with a profoundly individualized subjectivity inseparable from the writer.
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