Blogging: The Accidental Literature



A very interesting logging entry caught my eye recently:

From James Snell (http://www.snellspace.com/blog/archives/000258.html)

hehe... well, apparently there are a couple of folks who would like me separate my personal political views from my thoughts on Web services. To answer that request, I've created a number of categories and corresponding home page views and RSS feeds.

The request James received really bothered me. Don’t misunderstand: I respect his decision to split his blog. I just feel that this request is, well, rude. I have no clue who made the request, and I’m sympathetic to it as well. I disagree with most of James’ political views. But, I enjoy hearing about his point of view.

After some thinking, what I realized why this bothered me. To illustrate, I’ll give you an analogy: imagine a painter painted a beautiful picture and hung it in a gallery. You had to enter the gallery to see the picture. But let’s imagine in one corner of this picture is a symbol that you find objectionable (or even hate). Would you feel comfortable asking the artist to modify the picture? I would posit that most people would not. Why?

There’s a concept of the artist integrity. The idea is that the artist decides how to compose his piece of work. It’s general considered bad form to request an artist (at least for non-commissioned works) change his artwork. The consumers of the artwork get to either view it whole, or not view it.

My point? Blogging is a new form of literature. I don’t think this was intentional. You could argue even that not all blogs are literature. But, I would argue that nearly all personal blogs (like James’) are a journal-like piece of literature.

My contention is that my blog is a work of art, and so is James’. So is yours. It’s an accident. I don’t think it was intended to. But, I think it is. That means all of us blog authors deserve the respect and customs usually accorded to artists and writers.

This may sound hoity-toity, but I think it’s true. Even more so, when blogs interact with each other, you find an almost community piece of literature is built.

I don’t think I’ve entirely made my argument in this entry. I’ll try to add more later. In the meantime, I’ve extremely interested in what others have to say.