Digital Bibliography

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 »

(I just finished this rough version of a talk I gave on Roland Barthes this week at the Louisville Conference on Literature Since 1900. I want to share it. It’s relevant. About blogging. And I’m sort of a Roland Barthes fanboy lately. I would love to know your reactions. Feel free to share. That said…)

Blogs, as a genre, don’t really have an origin. There is no first blog or blogger. Blogs weren’t invented. They evolved. But they didn’t evolve from a single source. (See Rosenberg’s Say Everything.) Instead, they might be best understood as the confluence of several fluid cultural threads. Computers have become relatively cheap and mobile. Access to networks is becoming almost ubiquitous. And blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger are free and easy to use.

We are a an attention-culture obsessed with identity. Reality television, 24 hour immersive media, and daytime talk shows have made celebrities out of nobodies. And they’ve dissolved the lines between performance, personal revelation, and public disclosure. And we finally have the technologies to establish our own space, however small, within that public landscape. Welcome to the blogosphere.

Roland Barthes published his autobiography, Roland Barthes, in 1975, when there were no blogs. The Internet was still in its infancy, and Barthes makes no mention of it in his work.

And yet, I sit/stand here before you asking you to consider Roland Barthes as relevant to blogging.

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