Blogs and Archaeology

The topic has come up on Kathy the Carmelite's Blog about meeting fellow bloggers in person. I have met three St. Blog folks (although one I met before I realized he had a blog, and then read his blog and did not realize that it was the fellow I had eaten lunch with before), and it really is fun.

Thinking about this makes me think about the peculiar nature of the Blog discourse. I like the interactivity (as long as it is respectful and intelligent, the comments trolls that some folks seem to attract are an inevitable side effect, I guess), the balance between serious matters and less serious matters (they are actually arguing about retsina over at another blog), as well as formal writing and almost conversational discourse. I also like the fact that blogging becomes self-selecting, with folks gravitating towards various subinterests. Once in awhile I can scan some of the others to see if there is anything I need to read, but I have just a few that I look at every day.

The one thing that bugs me about blogs, however, is the time limit on a discussion. I suppose it is a good thing, as it keeps things from getting drawn out, but sometimes a good dialog gets cut off when the post moves too far down the page. There must be some way of letting particularly active posts float up towards the top.

When blogging will really get interesting is when the cultural historians, literature theoreticians, and semioticians start cataloging and developing a theory and poetics of the blog. Expect some whacky writing, as well as some good theory. Of course the big question is how much of this will really be archived. Will it float through cyberspace eternally? Will it quietly fade away? Will it fade away only to pop up on some fanatic's machine (Look! I single-handedly saves all web pages that were available on July 15th, 2003! This will revolutionize the study of 21st Century History!)? If it all lasts, how will all of it be sifted, sorted and digested? I foresee some horrible grad student projects in this.

If it is randomly erased from memory, with a few things popping up for random reasons, will they assume strange mythologies: We know that the writer known as Nihil Obstat served as some kind of judge to the religious community of the time (often referred to as St. Blog's Parish - even though we have no information about the life of St. Blog - some in Rome have even suggested, behind closed doors and in hushed tones, that he never existed, he was important enough that they named a whole system after him).

One last musing: what if Proust had a blog? Think about that as you watch the sun set over the horizon!