I listened with interest to the video "Blogitecture" (MIT, HTC Forum, n.d.) featuring presentations by Kazys Varnelis and Javier Arbona. Prior to the forum, Varnelis published a note on blogs, which amounted to the five cursive points that he elaborated in his MIT talk. I would take these points as brief proposals, as hypothetical or exploratory trials to come to an interesting new or (re)emerging definition that would plainly set apart both the work and the role of the traditional print-media writer from that of the writer who basically self-publishes online, or in a word "blogs."
In critical appraisal, I found each point that Varnelis drew - in attempt to chronicle the ostensible rise of the online writer - equally applicable to the digital scribe's historical precursor. Might there be any difference at all? I think there is. And to accentuate distinction, I would classify the latter as an auto-publishing online writer and work from there. The essential practice of scribbling thoughts and referencing them remains intact. Differences arise, then, not from the means of intellectual production, but their means of presentation and distribution. What is more, the essential apparatuses that handle this are hardly more than a logical extension to the mechanicalization of visual/intellectual reproduction, comparable to the advent of the camera, say, that transformed the manner in which both the ideas and the products of an "industrial art" gained distribution in particular regard to a sheer volume increase or "graphic/intellectual/digital traffic" (see Re. The Apparatus).
In critical appraisal, I found each point that Varnelis drew - in attempt to chronicle the ostensible rise of the online writer - equally applicable to the digital scribe's historical precursor. Might there be any difference at all? I think there is. And to accentuate distinction, I would classify the latter as an auto-publishing online writer and work from there. The essential practice of scribbling thoughts and referencing them remains intact. Differences arise, then, not from the means of intellectual production, but their means of presentation and distribution. What is more, the essential apparatuses that handle this are hardly more than a logical extension to the mechanicalization of visual/intellectual reproduction, comparable to the advent of the camera, say, that transformed the manner in which both the ideas and the products of an "industrial art" gained distribution in particular regard to a sheer volume increase or "graphic/intellectual/digital traffic" (see Re. The Apparatus).
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