Let’s do a deconstruction.

I found a post on blogging by a professional from the marketing-world. Funny enough I found it by searching for mp3’s of James Chance and the Contortions, namely here: http://somevelvetblog.blogspot.com/.

The piece originally was posted here: http://www.mpdailyfix.com/ and comes from here: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/, exactly: http://h20325.www2.hp.com/blogs/kintz/archive/0001/01/01/1120.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN.

I’d like to deconstruct some of the assumptions in this post to bring into perspective how much the view of the marketing-world, and their idea of corporate blogging is rooted in an idea of publishing that is superseded by blogging. The funny thing is that the conlusions of the research and the advises taken from it, do correspond quite well with my own view on/feeling about blogging. But I’d say those things should’ve been clear from the start…

I will quote the whole text Why Blog Post Frequency Does Not Matter Anymore from Eric Kintz — in italics — and add my commentary.

“Thou shall post every day” is the most fundamental and most well known principle of blogging….

— It never was. Only marketeers who’d like to reach out to an audience and have that audience stay with their blog, want this. Why would you like an audience to stay? The only real reason I can think of is: Google-ad revenue. Power? Having people read what you scribbled? My god, there are millions like you… Conversation? That comes from putting up good content. Not from blogging daily.

Every new blogger is warned about “the” ultimate rule and is confronted with the pressure of a day going by with no new post. Every one has in mind the examples of successful bloggers, like Robert Scoble at Microsoft, who post several times a day. Daily posting shows that you are serious about blogging, generates traffic and drives reader loyalty, as readers come back daily to check your new posts. You cannot be successful if you do not go by the rule, right? RIGHT?

— No. See above. Who wants to be like Robert Scoble?

Wrong. Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

— Well, you have my attention now.

#1- Traffic is generated by participating in the community; not daily posting – The blogosphere doubles in size every 6 months and cutting through the clutter will become ever more difficult with a new blog emerging every second. Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter.

— Who cares about traffic? Only the ones who have (Google-)ads going? Participating in a community is important, but not because it generates traffic. (Want traffic? Write a bot that visits). But the next sentence is really troubling, it actually states that the idea is that the ideal is that we should go through the whole blogosphere every day… As if there is one blogosphere where everybody talks about the same subjects, a blogosphere that one can keep an eye on, in its whole. That idea is wrong. At least since Bacon and Locke discovered that there were more books around than they could ever read in a whole lifetime, it has been impossible to keep track of everything going on. The fact that the amount of postings doubles in size every 6 months is meaningless in this respect. One can only follow a fracture of it — indeed a few “communities”-of-interests that one participates in. “Daily posting deals with the clutter by adding more clutter” is exactly what blogging is about, and has always been about. Is that a paradox? It is what writes have always done. Bacon and Locke dealt with “information overload” by adding to it: making summaries, indexes, their own notes and commentaries.

Although this strategy made sense 12 months ago and still makes sense for the top bloggers, its effectiveness diminishes with every new blog created. Traffic is generated by successful bloggers linking to you either in their posts or in their blogroll. Mack at Viral Garden has a series of great posts on the importance of joining the community.

— Again: who cares about traffic? 99,9% of bloggers will never receive links from the top-bloggers (who are not characteristic of blogging at all, I think). Blogging goes on, and blooms in the realm of 1 to 30 visitors a day.

#2 – Traffic is irrelevant to your blog’s success anyway– Unless you specifically target bloggers like Bruce, are a blogging consultant or blog about your latest book, traffic is irrelevant to you. What matters most is whether you are reaching your target audience (which may be narrow and focused), not necessarily how many people read your posts. Engaging with the audience you want to have a relationship with is a much smarter strategy than posting frequently.

— Ah, now we’re talking. “Traffic is irrelevant. Engage with your audience!” True. Better still would be “Traffic is irrelevant. Write about what you are passionate. Don’t think about an audience.” Actually that’s already what Rebecca Blood advised years ago.

#3- Loyal readers coming back daily to check your posts is so Web 1.0 – As the blogosphere matures, the number of new readers and bloggers will decrease and loyal readers are going to matter more. I have heard many bloggers tell me that they will lose reader loyalty if these readers come back daily and do not see any new posts. This perception is still very strong although irrelevant. Loyal readers subscribe to your blog via RSS feeds and have new content pushed to them. They will remain loyal because they have subscribed, not because you post frequently.

— Now it starts to be interesting. Loyal readers subscribe through RSS. (Is that true? I subscribe to over a hundred feeds, yet prefer to visit the blogs themselves. Going through feeds is what I do when I’m offline). Actually the whole idea of loyal readers is I think much more “under threat” because most internet-users will find a blog thanks to a Google-search, and then migth explore that particular niche by clicking a few links (for instance from the linkslist or blogroll of that blog.) Or they might — technorati-style — follow a certain subject (technically a ‘tag’), being fed with bits and pieces from different blogs that are ‘tagged’ as that subject. In that way people read much more through different blogs than follow the blogs they are loyal to.

#4 – Frequent posting is actually starting to have a negative impact on loyalty: Seth Godin (a frequent blogger) has a very interesting theory.According to him, RSS fatigue is already setting in. With too many posts, you run the risk of losing loyal readers, overwhelmed by the clutter you generate. Readers will start to tune off if your blog takes up too much of their time.

— Well, what is the problem there? The only rule is: write what you are passionate about even if that means putting up enormous amounts of texts daily. If your text is a good one, you will be read, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few weeks time, or even later on. Is there a problem with newspapers, thousands daily writing about sometimes the exact same subjects? (A good style of writing is often one that uses words economically, that is true, and something else).

#5: Frequent posting keeps key senior executives and thought leaders out of the blogosphere – My colleagues and industry peers cite bandwidth constraints as the number one reason for not blogging. They are absolutely right: frequent posting is not very compatible with a high pressure job. As an example, not one single blog is authored by a senior corporate marketing blogger in the top 25 marketing blogs listed by Mack. Not only does the blogosphere lose valuable thought leadership, it runs the risk of being overlooked by these very same marketers.

— Ha ha. Those marketeers, concerned about the senior executives and ‘thought leaders’ –, the thought leaders are publishing on the web. (Okay, this text is about corporate blogging). And yes, blogging is time consuming. Did anyone ever say something else? Did anyone ever say that everyone should blog? Of course the senior executives are not blogging. Of course we hardly have fulltime nurses blogging. Is that a problem? Is it a problem that senior executives are not writing novels, shooting movies, uploading their favorite recipes?

A recent study by Forrester found a reluctance among marketers to shift from more tried-and-true online channels like search and e-mail marketing. Just 13 percent reported using blogs or social networks in marketing, and 49 percent said they had no plans to do so in the next year. If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype), frequent posting and required bandwidth are undoubtedly a major barrier to adoption.

— Good. The less marketeers use the blogosphere, the better; also blogging might be exactly the opposite of marketing. But this sentence is troublesome: ” If the blogosphere wants to become more mainstream (vs. being the latest hype)”. Hmm, if almost everybody is blogging — 75 year old retired managers, 15 year olds from the MySpace-generation, and everybody in between — how to become, well, more ‘mainstream’ than that? The problem is here: blogging (and the internet in general) has shown that there is exactly no reason whatsoever to know who Madonna is, it has shown that ‘mainstream’ is an invention of mass-media — or at least a mass-media-phenomenon.

#6: Frequent posting drives poor content quality – The pressure of daily posting drives many bloggers to re-purpose other bloggers’ content or give quick un-insightful comments on the news. Few bloggers have enough time (or expertise) to write daily thought leadership pieces, thus adding to the clutter. Ben at the Church of the Customer Blog explores the 1% rule and cites the Wikipedia example: 25 million readers visit Wikipedia every month, but the number of people who actually contribute content to Wikipedia is about 1-2 percent of total site visitors. I would argue that the same is valid for the blogosphere as a whole where most of the original high value content is driven by 1% of the bloggers. Some of the most insightful –and most quoted- marketing thought blogging leaders are actually infrequent posters, from Sam Decker to Charlene Li or Randi Baseler.

— Good. Point taken. I think this is largely true as long as bloggers think they have to write about ‘what goes on in the media’. But the 1% original content sounds too pessimistic. It does not take into account that a lot of blogging exactly consists — not of putting up ‘original content’ — but in constructing a distributed conversation on a certain subject. Bloggers who ‘live’ in the same niche, react to each other. That is blogging. What is original content anyway?

#7: Frequent posting threatens the credibility of the blogosphere – as many bloggers re-purpose existing content under the pressure of daily posting, they do not take the time to do any sort of due diligence and conduct effective research. Errors snowball in the blogosphere as they spread from one blogger to the other. The collective wisdom of user generated content was supposed to provide an alternative to biased traditional media content – it is instead echoing the thoughts and biases of a few.

— Blogging is not journalism. Yet I agree that, if one takes blogging seriously, one should try to check sources, give the right references, et cetera. But I know I do not always do that. It’s the ‘freedom’ of blogging — in opposition to journalism — to be inexact, and say “it is inexact, sorry, but that’s how I felt”. An important part of our media literacy should be our competence of checking sources, being able to ascertain the credibility of a text.

#8 – Frequent posting will push corporate bloggers into the hands of PR agencies – As they struggle with bandwidth constraints as well as peer pressure to join the blogosphere, more and more companies will resort to partnering with their PR agencies to create blogs. The blogosphere will in turn lose some of its effectiveness and value.

— Yes. I think that is true. But do I care? I do not read those blogs. They hardly exist in my world. Btw: PR and blogging are very closely connected, at least in the Netherlands, and at least ever since financial minister Gerrit Zalm started a blog. Again: we readers should be able to tell what the interests are that are represented by a certain blog.

#9 – Frequent posting creates the equivalent of a blogging landfill – According to Technorati, only 55% of bloggers post after 3 months of existence. The pressure of the first months to write frequently certainly contributes to people abandoning their blogs. Is that in the blogosphere’s best interest to have a third of its participants frustrated by their initial efforts?

— Does the blogosphere care? Again I do not see what the problem is. A third of the people who start a blog find out that it is quite an effort to blog. It is not everybodies idea of a pasttime, apparently not everybodies idea of a way of dealing with the sheer amount of interesting stuff available. I agree that nobody should say that one should blog every day. (Whoever said that to begin with?)

#10 – I love my family too much – Ann pointed out to me this cool blog that highlights the challenges of blogging addiction – Bloggers Anonymous. Very funny…..

If you want to be a top 50 Technorati blogger, you will most probably still need to post several times a day. But for the rest of us, we should think seriously about the added value of frequent blogging. Actually, according to Technorati, only 11% of all blogs update weekly or more. What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write.

— If you want to become a top 50 Technorati-blogger you are either ultra-american (culturally speaking) or you have a very strange idea of the world. It is as if you take up cycling as a pasttime with the ambition to win the Tour of France. So I agree whole-hearted with “What will matter more and more is what you write and how you engage, not how often you write”. But I think it has never been different.

As the blogosphere matures, the measure of success will shift from traffic to reader loyalty. As Seth Godin says in his post, “blogging with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.” As for me, I will continue to post only when I have something to say.

— Well, I on the contrary sometimes blabber on. Also because I never know what will turn out the be important… not beforehand.

Just now read Jodi Dean’s paper on blogging for Hyperpolis. Very good, makes quite a few points I would’ve liked to make. I hope it’s allright with her that I already ‘reblog’ & pick some quotes (btw, these quotes do not capture her main point really):

“To be sure, words beyond control are a noted feature of writing. Academics, journalists, and bookwriters have long been familiar with the ways our words take on a life of their own. Blogging accentuates this new life. It makes more people aware of the ways that their words are not theirs.”

“Bloggers imagine communities. In part, they mark this imagining with their link lists. Yet, these lists are as (if not more) changing, uncertain, and porous as any other border.”

“My experience with blogs is that they allow for slower reflection, the emergence of spaces of affinity through specialized writing, and the experience of a presentation and cultivation of a self. These three attributes of blogs—reflection, affinity, self-cultivation—necessarily traverse the old liberal division of the world into public and private spheres.”

“A critical theory of blogging cannot extend out of presumptions of journalism, punditry, and relations to mainstream media. Instead, it has to begin from the communicative practices specific to blogging, practices that install confrontations with difference, with otherness.”

From Jodi Dean, Blogging Difference, 2006, paper for Hyperpolis, see http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2006/10/blogging_differ.html.

With regard to the last point I cite here — basically Jodi Dean’s conclusion — I agree in principle that yes, a critical theory of blogging should start with looking at communicative practices that are specific to blogging. But there are various types of blogs: some are focussed on conversations, some (like that of Jodi Dean) are indeed confrontations with the other (but isn’t all talk, and all writing in a sense a confrontation with otherness?) And then there are also the blogs, (notably some early ones) that are not conversational at all, that do not even want the confrontation, or who prefer to not even look at comments, if there are any. (Hey, why do I write this here and not in the comments of Jodi Dean’s blog? That characterizes me…. — supposing that trackbacking does the job?). Two extremes: there’s the blog as ‘my turf’, ‘my voice’ — and there’s the blog as an invitation to chat. And on a lot of blogs there’s not much ‘otherness’ of ‘confrontation’ going on… I should say that Jodi Dean tackles this issue as well in her paper (and looks at how a blog is also ‘me talking’), yet she emphasises the confrontation with otherness where I’d put more emphasis on the ‘publish for no public’-aspect.

Reading through about 20 papers composed for three Blogtalk conferences — some of which are very good, some of which I’m not interested in (the ones measuring & analyzing the ‘blogosphere’) — it becomes clear to me again, that my interest is in the perspective of the writer, the author. How does a writer/author use the tools of writing and publishing nowadays? I do not look at the whole blogosphere, I do not look at how we could design our tools better, or look at why certain tools are used and others are not. My question is: how does an author posit him/herself? By writer or author I do not, in this instance, refer to anybody publishing something, but to those one’s whose life depends on it — either economically or because it’s felt from ‘the soul’. This definition rules out, in a sense, those bloggers who blogs because he/she wants to join in, or start a conversation. What we see with blogging is that we get writing that is not dominantly ‘about’ something, or about itself (let’s say Jakobsons poetic function), but writing that is dominantly an invitation to chatter. (In that sense not all writing and publishing is aimed at starting or joining in a conversation). Open the channel and keep the channel open. ‘Let’s talk, it doesn’t matter about what, because I feel like talking’. Yet the boundary is very shady and will become shadier in the future. My questions concern exactly that boundary too.

This comes as a real shock. Last week the young Dutch poet/blogger/thinker — I don’t know what I should call him — Jeroen Mettes ‘stepped out of this life, voluntarily’: http://n30.nl/2006/09/blog-post.html. I missed that it had happened, not having visited his blog, or one of the other Dutch blogs on poetry for a week and a half. I never met Jeroen Mettes, never e-mailed him, never left comments on his blog — yet I always read what he wrote with more than great interest. I knew him by his written words only. He was an ‘original voice’, a voice, that made me long for the future of literature, a future that his words, his poetics, I imagined, might shape.

Just quickly read 2 articles that seemed interesting.

“Structure of Self-Organized Blogosphere” — (language: international english of the Chinese variety) — pdf here: http://arxiv.org/pdf/math.ST/0607361. Which is ‘one of those’ statistical analyses of linking in the blogosphere. Conclusions: ‘the blogging network has small-world property’ and the distribution of links-in and links-out follows a power-law. In other words: here’s a sort of statistical ‘proof’ of the common knowledge that a few celebrity blogs receive lots of incoming links, and most blogs hardly receive links. I’m not so interested in this kind of network-research, it seems to be more about (statistical/mathematical) network-theory, than about communication, flow of information &c. tho’ it’s possible that I miss the point.

“Copy and Paste Literacy: Literacy Practices in the Production of a MySpace Profile – An Overview” by Dan Perkel strikes me as more interesting: a simple and to the point analysis of how MySpace is used. He argues that one could see MySpace as an “informal learning environment that fosters the development of new literacies”. One could state that of a lot of similar enviroments and softwares, I’d say, yet this overview, accompanied by different theories about ‘literacy’ I found worthwhile reading. It is clear and straightforward in its approach — looking at how copy & pasting of code, links, images, music and video is used in MySpace. Although, again it does not go further than confirming what one (well, I) already believe(s). But that’s no so bad… Text is online here: http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~dperkel/media/dperkel_literacymyspace.pdf.

Found these papers thanks to http://jilltxt.net.

Perkel points to the ‘problem’, for theories of literacy, that copy&paste and remixing is generally not seen as ‘writing’. (Well, he writes: “However, the importance of copying and pasting code does not easily fit in the common conventions of reading and writing, consumption and production.”) But what if we’d go back to antique rhetorics, where learning to deal with the tropes and commonplaces, is part of learning to write & construct an argument. To really make that analogy would be stretching the point — yet I’d say that ‘writing’ is also learning to use “pre-fab elements” in a good way. (And then the question is: what is that good way?)

Nice (well, useful, quotable) quotes:

“Genre is the conceptual glue that binds social activity to technical activity. In order to understand what literacy might be, one must pay attention to the particularities of social activity, to the particularities of media, and also to the generic forms and competencies that groups share in their use of a media.” (p. 3)

“Bakhtin argues that, “genres must be fully mastered in order to be manipulated freely,” implying both a mastery of both recognizing generic forms and using them, or generic competencies (80).” (p. 6)

“HTML and CSS, like other programming languages, encourage a particular way of thinking about problems. For example, learning to use them requires learning how to think modularly. The rhetoric concerning the separation of content and style, however useful, embodies a certain way of understanding communication.” (p. 8)

“The idea that same message in different form is still the same message implies that social context of use, the specifics of the activity, and the specifics of the medium have little importance in determining meaning. Regardless of how one feels about this rhetoric, learning to think this way, uncritically, may have important consequences.” (p. 8)

“[H]ow good of a learning environment is MySpace for mastering the representational form and technical competency of web programming? Certainly, it provides an introduction to the medium, and some even may learn more about HTML and CSS as a part of trying to customize their profiles. However, the way in which the MySpace designers use CSS works completely against the point of style sheets.” (p. 8) (Hear me say: “right you are!”)

Now go on to read: Henry Jenkins, “Learning by Remixing”: http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2006/07/learning_by_remixing.html.

I’ve been reading too. And making notes. All of that didn’t make it into the blog.

Spending two days in Brussels at Acting Out Technology (http://www.actingouttechnology.be) was very much worth while.

On the first day I delivered a long sort of improvised talk on 1. Latourian Dingpolitik, ANT, Latours definition of a network, and 2. Web 2.0-stuff. For me it functioned (also) as an explanation of the connection between both. A first public attempt at it. It often feels as if I just happen to think about/reseach online collaboration & sharing & publication issues, and am reading Latour at the same time. But both strands inform each other. I hope to be able to ‘pull them together’ in a text too….

The second day it was to art-historian Eric de Bruyn & his talk on the network in the history of art — from roughly Stan VanderBeek and the Eames IBM-pavilion, via Conceptual Art toward Radical Software. (I love all that). Thomas Zummer — also present — came up good issues & explanations & ideas during discussion with the workshop participants. & some of the proposals of the participants were very, very promising. Inspiring.

I read Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste in the new Dutch translation. Further exploring the world 18th century publishing. Also took a look at Tobias Smolett’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Smollett) The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, and some more Samuel Johnson. Just the fun stuff at the side — but what I learn from it spills over into other areas of interest. Early 18th century being, of course, interesting for its changes in the publishing industry, copyright, writers living from what they write for money etc.

And then I picked up Peter Rawlings American Theorists of the Novel, James, Trilling, Booth, from the series Routlede Critical Thinkers (http://www.routledge.com/). (Just because it was a recent acquisition of the library). It’s not a very inspiring book, and I wonder why we (or students of literature) would need a guide to James, Trilling and Booth. Whatever you have against Gerard Genette and narratology, the theories from that field go beyond James and Booth if you ask me. Maybe not when you focus on ‘morality’ — a big issue for James, Trilling and Booth, But when it comes to literature & morality, one better picks up Rorty or Nussbaum (and no, I do not particularly like their approaches to literature).

Of course James’ introductions to his novels are monuments. Certainly Trilling wrote inspiring essays (I did not read anything of Trilling). Booth’ Rhetoric of Fiction is a classic — euh, already considered outdated when I studied Literary Theory end of the eighties.

So why did I read this ‘guide’?

1. In contemporary literature (also in the Netherlands) James — and his theories of storytelling — keep popping up. It is as if he is the grand master to whom one has to turn to really learn what it means to write a novel. I want to understand better: why James…? Of course James is great (though I have severe problems enjoying his writing). But he doesn’t particularly strike me as a ‘model’ for contemporary literature. Am I wrong?

2. I’m interested in AmLit. I do like to read the American essayist Leslie Fiedler for instance. I’ve never read anything of Trilling.

And what did I get?

1. A short recap of Jamesian + Boothian theory. Always handy. Also a reconfirmation that I rather turn to Genette, early Barthes, Russian formalism & structuralism or Bachtin for insights.

2. An idea of Trillings position — he is conservative in his thinking about the art of the novel, and progressive in terms of its transforming power. For me the useful eye-opener is Trillings opposition of ‘sincerity’ and authenticity’: ‘sincerity’ as connected to rhetoric, appearance, 18th century literature, persona’s; and ‘authenticity’ as the twentieth century idea of a true inner self (Freud being important for Trilling). Trilling would like literature to be about the discovering of this authenticy — against the ‘unreal sincerity’. (Well, this is from a summary of Trilling, I have not yet read his Sincerity and Authenticity).

In this way my reading of Jacques le Fataliste, and exploration of rhetorics (with its idea of the ‘ethos’ of the speaker), connects nicely with reading through a not so inspiring guide on American theories of the novel…

“As soon as actors are treated not as intermediaries but as mediators, they render the movement of the social visible to the reader. Thus through many textual inventions, the social may become again a circulating entity that is no longer composed of the stale assemblage of what passed earlier as being part of society.” (p. 128)

“A text, in our definition of social science, is thus a test on how many actors the writer is able to treat as mediators and how far he or she is able to achieve the social.” (p. 129)

— One could almost read this as the definition of a good novel. (Of the Richard Powers-kind — Latour being as much influenced by Powers as Powers is by Latour’s view of science, technology and society. One can also still ‘feel’ the Greimas-influence here (his actant-theory, stories as transformations &c.).)

“A good text elicits networks of actors when it allows the writer to trace a set of relations defined as so many translations.” (p. 129)

“In a bad text only a handful of actors will be designated as the causes of all the others, which will have no other function than to serve as a backdrop or relay for the flows of causal efficacy. (…) Nothing is translated from one to the other since action is simply carried through them.” (p. 130).

— Because this reads like the definition of a bad novel.

Latour stresses that writing texts is an ‘art’ (although he doesn’t use the word art here):

“The simple act of recording anything on paper is already an immense transformation that requires as much skill and just as much artifice as painting a landscape or setting up some elaborate biochemical reaction.”

And, interestingly, he wants descriptions, not explanations: “If a description remains in need of an explanation, it means that it is a bad description.” (p. 137) A good description is an explanation. I’d like to agree.

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2005.

In Reassembling the Social Latour, after having stated that ‘tracing social connections’ in effect means ‘writing down accounts’ (p. 122), and after having said that “good sociology has to be well written; if not the social doesn’t appear through it” (p. 124), tells us that as good sociologists, researchers, scientists, we should keep four different notebooks — manual or digital:

1. “a log of the enquiry itself (…) to document the transformation one undergoes by doing the travel.” (p. 134)

2. one for “gathering information”, both structured chronological as well as dispatched into categories, that can be refined.

3. one for “ad libitum writing”, to record haphazardly the ideas that occur while studying and researching.

4. one “kept to register the effect of the written account on the actors whose world has been either deployed or unified.” (p. 135)

I’m a worthless researcher…

Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, Oxford UP, Oxford, 2005.

“… consider … the arts of transmission in the broad sense of the phrase as Bacon used it—namely, as the whole of the procedures that circulate, record, and organize knowledge.”

“David Hume declared explicitly that the fundamental advantage of the printing press seemed to be the potential to continuously improve and amend books in various editions.”

“On all of these levels it is interesting to note that the turning point is not the introduction of the printing press but much earlier, in the eleventh century, when the use of images became more complex and when the separation of words and efficient forms of punctuation became common. Various research instruments like verbal concordances (word indexes) and material concordances (subject indexes) were developed, overcoming even the mistrust for conventional cataloguing systems like alphabetical order, which bore no relation to the ultimate order of the world. The printing press was introduced into a foment of active experimentation with the forms of presentation and the organization of manuscripts, which were innovations connected with mostly autonomous developments like the increase and consequent standardization of available books. Collectively, these developments created a favorable environment for the consolidation and the success of the typographical innovation.”

“Terence Cave speaks of a discovery of the reader in the sixteenth century, based on a circular and indeterminate relationship between the writer and the reader; 31 the writer writes so as to compel the reader to elaborate his or her own autonomous perspective, that is, to presuppose his or her active role. A practice of generative reading is thus stabilized, where the text is used as material to be interpreted according to criteria and interests completely foreign to the one writing.” [See: See Terence Cave, “The Mimesis of Reading in the Renaissance,” in MIMESIS: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, ed. J. Lyons and S. Nichols (Hanover, N.H., 1984), pp. 149–65.]

“[T]he medieval allegorical reading aimed at identification with, and not at detachment from, the perspective presented in the text (which was not that of the writer, but on a noncontingent and nonsubjective level).”

[Then, comparing the age of mass media with the age of the internet:]

“Where there was anonymity there is now personalization, where there was unilaterality there is interactivity, where there was the mass there is individual configuration, and above all, where there was an instrument expected to be as not noisy as possible, to not interfere with the message, there is now a machine used precisely to process information.”

“Computers and only computers are able to radically loosen the unity of communication in the search for new forms that mostly had not been considered by the one who produced the information.”

“Features that are perfectly casual from the point of view of the one drafting them, such as recurrent constructions and the redundancy present in lists or directories, are used by the computer in order to achieve effective ways of processing, with unpredictable results (think of compression techniques or the work of search engines).”

“In this case, information is valuable not because of what it conveys by itself (everyone builds their own information from their own perspective) but because it selects possibilities–a place from which one can start, like a computer does, to create more and more complex forms. Information then has value only as a precondition for a further decomposition into elements, which leads to recombination into forms.”

Elena Esposito, ‘ The Arts of Contingency’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.esposito.htm.

“The memo, for example, might have an audience of one, or none; it might be read once, or never. But however vanishingly ephemeral its interest, it must nonetheless be preserved, that is, filed.”

“In an argument notably ingenious, if not persuasive, he [Herbert Spencer in Philosophy of Style] asserts that poetry is in fact more economical than prose in its demand on the reader’s attention. The evidence for this point is the extreme compression of poetic language, particularly figurative language; but Spencer has confused compression, which might very well tax the reader’s attention by producing ambiguity, with a concept of brevity that would seem to resist ambiguity as an impediment to communication.”

[Ah — wasn’t it Yuri Lotman who, much later, argued along the same lines?]

“Tufte’s critique of PowerPoint confirms a distinction between concision and clarity, since the burden of his critique is to remind us that sometimes more words are required in order for communication to be effective. There is no easy correlation between the quantity of words and the quality of communication, and this mysterious intransigence of language, which goes very deep, means that it will probably never be possible to reduce writing to rules, schemata, or the algorithms that run computer programs.”

“The norm of clarity arose from the publicness of print culture, which presupposed that written communications were addressed ideally to everyone, to the hypothetical “general reader.””

John Guillory, ‘The Memo and Modernity’, in Critical Inquiry 31, 2004, http://www.uchicago.edu/research/jnl-crit-inq/features/artsstatements/arts.guillory.htm.