What is a Blogger?

John Logie

Abstract

Blogs are sometimes defined as “online diaries,” but this definition overlooks the degree to which blogs typically intertwine the composer’s own words with external links to news articles, current topics, and responses from visitors. Indeed, the quantity and quality of external links (and commentary)  is often seen as a measure of a blog’s success. Thus, bloggers should be understood as unusually dependant composers, relying heavily on externally produced prose. This mode of composition is in keeping with the theoretical arc of the continental critique of authorship, and challenges conventional understandings of the obligations of the author as originator and owner of specific texts.

This presentation will expressly invoke Foucault’s “What is an Author?” as a lens with which to understand the broad range of authorial practices evident in current weblogs. In particular, this presentation will pursue the question of whether bloggers have arrived at a “blogger-function,” paralleling the “author-function” described in Foucualt’s germinal essay. Foucault suggests that the cultural expectations and patterns of behavior attached to authorship have effectively superseded the composing individual. Blogs and bloggers have a comparatively brief history, but already a network of expectations and conventions is determining the boundaries and polarities of a genre that was initially understood as approaching pure self-expression. 

In general terms my argument will be that blogs make manifest the permeable, polyvocal qualities that were always latent in textual composition. By so doing, bloggers offer a preview of what may well prove to be the conventions for 21st Century composition in networked environments.

About the Author

John Logie is known for his work addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership, with a particular focus on how communicative technologies -- especially electronic media -- intersect with and influence these questions. He is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Minnesota, having received his Ph.D. from Pennsylvania State University in 1999. His dissertation, The Author('s) Proper(ty): Rhetoric, Literature, and Constructions of Authorship, surveyed theoretical approaches to textual ownership from Ancient Greece to the Information Age. Logie's writing has appeared in First Monday, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, Computers and Composition, KBJournal, Technical Communication Quarterly, and several edited collections. Logie's monograph on the rhetoric of the debates over peer-to-peer technologies entitled "Peers, Pirates, and Persuasion" will soon be published by Parlor Press. Logie is Chair of the Intellectual Property Committee of the Conference of College Composition and Communication. He was also Conference Coordinator for Internet Research 2.0: INTERconnections, the second international conference of the Association of Internet Researchers, held on the University of Minnesota Campus, October 10-14, 2001.