The Self-Construction of Public Identity (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Autobiography, Part IV of IV)
This is a difficult point. To begin with, let’s return, again, to a brief description of how blogs work. So far we’ve covered the prose entries themselves and the metadata structuring the definitions and operations of those entries. There are two additional elements, mostly non-manipulable by a blogs’ readers. Those two elements are the "blog theme" which is also referred to as the visual design, and the author’s "dashboard." A blog’s author can define, change, and experiment with all sorts interface elements. She can design different combinations of colors, graphics, and layouts to create a certain atmosphere framing the experience of the blog. But she also has access to her own "dashboard," an author-only interface where she configures certain navigational elements and small applets called "widgets." It’s here at the dashboard where she structures the ways which her visitors can search for specific terms, organize entries according to categories and keyword tags she defines. At no other point in the blogging experience is it more clear to the author just how much control she does and doesn’t have over the way her readers encounter her and her work.
Barthes has always been interested in self-representation. Even from his earliest writings, Barthes was constantly working toward a theoretical and practical understanding of his own work and identity as a writer.
The Reader’s Role in the Construction of Meaning (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Authobiography, Part III of IV)
A blog, though built and maintained by a writer, is an unweildy and restless semiotic object. Once configured, named, and populated with a handful of texts, a blog’s complexity begins to facilitate all sorts of emergences. Writers have habits and preoccupations, blind spots and projects. And as a writer takes on the practice of blogging, he becomes a blogger. And as his entries proliferate, Barthes would suggest that the illusion of an Author emerges. But we will get to that later in the presentation. Now I want to focus for a minute on one organizational element of blogs that constructs a blog’s readers as the arbiter of meaning. And that element is the database.
Though a blog’s interface may look a lot like a traditional webpage, a blog’s front page is really just a way of interacting with the underlying database. Without getting overly technical, suffice it to say that there are essentially two levels of meaning for every entry on a blog.
Fragmentation of Texts (Blogging, Authorship, and Roland Barthes’s Autobiography, Pt. II of IV)
One of the most recognizable attributes of blogs is their reverse chronological organization. More simply put, their content (also known as “entries” or “posts”). Bloggers post entries at any sort of frequency they wish. Some bloggers post several times daily. Others post only a few times a week or even less frequently. And most entries are relatively short, usually a couple hundred words, but not often pushing past a thousand. Now, stretch these two features out over a sporadic chronology and the experience of reading a blog is fragmentary. Coming to any given blog for the first time, a reader encounters a text revealing itself backward, one theme being dropped for another, only to be returned to later, or should I say returned to earlier? With blogs, there can be no illusions of linear cohesion. Only fragments.
And Barthes was no stranger to fragments. One can see this development over the course of his career. His early work on Michelet and Racine, as well as his theoretical essays in Writing Degree Zero are written in relatively standard academic prose. But with Mythologies, we see the atomization of his arguments into much smaller units, and in S/Z Barthes deals more fully with texts as fragments. Read the rest of this entry »
