Blog: Genre? Literary Form? Medium?

Genre?

Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd in Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog

'When a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre (Miller, 1984). The weblog seems to have acquired this status very quickly, with an increasing amount of attention and commentary in the mainstream press reinforcing its status.'

Literary Form?

Kathleen Fitzpatrick quoting Himmer 2004 in The Pleasure of the Blog.

'It is, according to Himmer, the shared codes among bloggers and blog readers that result in this process of narrative completion that produces the primary experience of reading blogs, an experience that he understands as "a distinctive literary and creative mode, something richer and more nuanced than viewing it as simply the outcome of a specific toolset or formal structure allows for” (Himmer).

And, as he goes on to note, such an understanding of the "literariness" of blogs makes clear that this quality is not one "achieved by some weblogs and lacking in others.... This literary nature of the weblog is instead the loose set of shared criteria that allows us to speak of a plurality of ‘weblogs’ in the first place” (Himmer). All blogs, for Himmer, are in some sense literary, because of the nature of their readers’ interactions with them.'

Medium?

Danah Boyd in Reconstruction 6:4 (2006)

"Moving away from [a] content-focused approach...blogs must be conceptualized as both a medium and a bi-product of expression. This shift allows us to see blogs in terms of culture and practice. Furthermore, this provides a framework in which to understand how blogging has blurred the lines between orality and literacy, corporeality and spatiality, public and private."