Epistemographer

Today, I went to an Information Law Institute lunch at NYU. The lunches, coordinated by Helen Nissenbaum, bring together an interdisciplinary crowd of people from NYU and elsewhere in the greater New York City area, including one or two of us from Cornell when we can be in town.

The speakers were Anil Dash, of Six Apart fame, Michael Weiksner of E the People and Jay Rosen of the NYU Department of Journalism. Jeff Jarvis was on the side of the room and did a good job of blogging the whole thing, so I won’t bother recounting the details (if I’d known that there was a live wifi connection there, I’d have brought my laptop and done the same).

I also managed to get in one of the only questions/comments, about the difficulty doing the day-to-day identity management that’s part and parcel of being an interdisciplinary scholar while maintaining a blog (sort of a variation on the necessity of envisioning your audience and writing for them). Sadly, there was little time whatsoever to actually discuss these and other issues – the speakers ran a good hour and a half, and barely managed to get ideas on the table, much less have a discussion to chew them over. Someday, it’ll be really fascinating to teach a semester-long seminar on blogging (which apparently is happening at NYU in the immediate future).

I walked away with the same thought that seems to pop up whenever there are a bunch of people talking about blogs in one room: everybody seems to agree that blogs are interesting, and most agree that they’re a Big Deal, but the “blog” as a technology seems to mean different things to different people. For Dash, blogs are fundamentally an outgrowth of the personal journal, while for Weiksner they’re a tool to organize activism and for Rosen they’re essentially another medium for thinking and teaching. I’m not saying that these different meanings don’t overlap in all sorts of Venn-diagramy ways, but there’s still an awful lot of interpretive flexibility around the blog as a technology (as opposed to its technical details).

This entry was posted on Friday, February 20th, 2004 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.