How Should Historians Read Blogs?

When I started this blog, one of the things I wanted to do was to think about blogs from an historian’s point of view. I’ve been doing some of that, but it’s more difficult than I first thought. Part of this is because of the sheer diversity of the form, something like trying to write about post-it notes from an historian’s point of view. More directly, though, there is the newness of the form. For older genres, there are techniques and strategies well-established for dissecting this text or that text. How to read a newspaper, a diplomatic telegram, an almanac, or a president’s letters – these are all topics well understood and much experienced by working historians.

Blogs resemble journals or diaries on one level, newspapers on another, but are clearly neither. For those kinds of texts, I already know how to approach them. With a newspaper, there are several things I know as a researcher. I know, for example, how newspapers are produced and why (something, of course, that is different in different time periods). I know never to confuse the thinking and the knowledge of the newspaper with that of its audience. I know there are certain questions I have to ask. What kind of ideological position does the op-ed page take? What kind of wall exists between the op-ed page and the news section? What kind of wall exists between the reporters and the advertising sales reps? Who is the target audience? One of the most important things to know about diaries is that, despite what most people think, diaries are meant to be read, and should never be thought of as uncensored stream of consciousness from the soul of the author. So one question to ask with a diary – who did the diarist expect was going to read this? What did they expect to achieve by having that person or audience read their diary?

But blogs? What are the rules for an historian reading a blog? What are the questions to ask? I imagine that the first impulse of most historians will be to treat blogs primarily as diaries. But there are some serious issues with this. Diaries do not usually reach an audience immediately upon being written, entry upon entry. Diaries are not (usually) interactive. Nor do diaries have web links, and thus do not have dead web links either (something that will definitely drive future researchers bananas). Unless the diarist is a person of prominence, most people do not expect a particularly large audience for their diary. Most diarists also expect to be able to control who reads their diary, at least in their own lifetimes. Blogs are not diaires.

Anyway, I’m still thinking barley formed thoughts about this. More poorly thought out posts on this subject to come.

What Does it Mean to be a Blogger?

I've been reading the essays in Uses of Blogs, which I recommend to anyone who has a serious interest in the blogging phenomenon. I’m not ready to delve deeply here into any of the essays, but one line in Alexander Halavais’s essay struck a chord for me. In “Scholarly Blogging: Moving toward the Visible College,” Halavais writes: “[S]o varied are the behaviors of bloggers that it is a bit surprising that the same term in used to cover them all.” (p. 117)

Indeed. In the recent dust-up over whether Pluto should be labeled a planet, the “anti-planet” faction argued, as they have for years, that Pluto is just too small to be put in the same rank as Earth, Jupiter, and the rest. But wait a minute – by that logic, is it not downright weird that we use the same term to refer to Earth and Jupiter? In fact, we don’t, exactly – Earth is a “terrestrial planet,” while Jupiter is a “gas giant” or a “Jovian planet.” The term planet itself means “moving star,” and is left over from the days when all we knew about Jupiter and Venus is that they looked just like that – like stars that moved.

And so we have this term, “blogger,” derived from “blog,” in turn derived from “weblog.” (Side thought – if we hadn’t shortened “weblog,” what would we call people who write them? “Weblies?”) It made sense to have one word when it was still possible for one person to read all the weblogs out there, or most of them at least. At that point, blogging was a subculture not terribly different from the zines phenomenon of hand-made, photocopied magazines, where even people writing radically different things had a sense of being part of a special tribe. (Another side thought – what’s happened to zines in the Age of Blogging?)

But like the word “planet”, the word “blog” becomes increasingly inadequate as more “reverse chronologically sequential narratives with a networked audience” come into view. What I’m doing and what Markos Moulitsas is doing really don’t have much to do with each other – and we’re both far removed from most of what goes on over at MySpace. There is no “blogosphere,” and thank God, because I hate that word. Physicists speculate about the possibility of multiple universes, and talk about the “multiverse.” Well, I don’t know if there’s a multiverse out there in space, but we’ve definitely already grown one here on the Internet. What should we call it? The multisphere? All I know is that my historian colleagues of the future are going to go nuts trying to figure this out. Good thing I’ll be retired by then.

(PS – Boy, this post has made the spellchecker nuts – someone needs to inform Microsoft that there’s this word “blog” – wonder if they know?)

Blogging in the Wind

Today I, once again, got a couple of credit card offers. I did what most people do with them - I threw them away. Credit card mailings, for the most part, are ephemera. In historical jargon, that word refers to those documents that are rarely preserved, usually because they are considered unimportant in their own time. Laundry lists, receipts, newspaper inserts, flyers stuck under your windshield wipers, junk mail - all ephemera, generally lost to time. Such documents though, because of their rarity, can be extremely valuable. The menu of a medieval lord's dinner, to say nothing of a peasant's dinner, is an exceptionally valuable document simply because it allows us a window on daily life that we can rarely see. And I guarantee that when the little boy in the picture is old enough to start working on his dissertation, "Household Debt and the Great Crash of 2014," he'll want to see those credit card offers to understand just how they suckered all those people into financial ruin.

This is my concern about blogs. While blog records are in fact being preserved on giant servers all over the world, electronic records, even when people want to keep them, have a limited shelf-life - and I'm not convinced that, say, ten years out, twenty years out, anyone will think it important to preserve these records, anyway. If this extraordinary record of the voices of millions of ordinary people is indeed going to survive, we must all make a concentrated effort to see that it happens. There are a lot of issues here - I intend to write about them much more.

By the way, one of the best ways to preserve a document is to throw it away. Biodegradation in most landfills, notably those that are dry and protected from the water table (actually, it's generally the other way around), is quite slow. Some of our most important sources for ancient documents have been landfills. I highly recommend Rubbish!: The Archaeology of Garbage by William L. Rathje and Cullen Murphy for anyone who wants to know more.

The Great Unread

Looking at the introduction to Uses of Blogs again, the opening essay by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs raises a vital point about misrepresentation of what the blogging universe is by much of the mainstream press. Viewed from CNN or Fox or The New York Times, the blogosphere is primarily opinion and news filter sites, places like DailyKos, Eschaton, Intsapundit, or God forbid, Little Green Footballs (not that I’m an Instapundit fan, either). But most people who blog, or have a page on Myspace or Facebook, or post to some Yahoo usergroup, are not doing that kind of thing. Much of the blog universe is much more quirky and personalized than that. Try clicking on "next blog" up on the banner if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Ok, so what? There are millions of blogs which almost no one reads (this being one of them - click on my Technocrati link at the bottom). They may be the bulk of the blog universe, but not in terms of readership. Well, I’m concerned about blogs as history, or better, as historical sources. This is the first time ever, in all of human history, that so much material from non-elite sources is available. This first blog generation has the opportunity to be better known to history than any that preceded. There are already political scientists studying DKos (I don’t know any examples, but I know my fellow academics, and I'm sure people are working on it) - but more attention needs to be paid to the folks lower down the food chain, which is one of the things Uses of Blogs does. It’s critical that academics take the great unread/barely read blogosphere seriously – and archivists, too. The mainstream media could help here, too. We could be the first generation to be fully known by history, if, if, if, all this is preserved.

Who are the bloggers?

Blogs are a potential goldmine for historians, if they get preserved, if historians learn to take them seriously, if they get preserved, if they can be reasonably catalogued, if they get preserved – well, so much for that dead horse.

Setting aside the preservation issue, the first thing any historian wants to know about any document is who wrote it? The “why” behind the writing is a close second. So, who are the bloggers and why are they writing? Ok, it ain’t new, but I wasn’t blogging when the Pew Internet & American Life Project brought out their most recent survey of bloggers (PDF). Some of it is counterintuitive – bloggers are more racially and ethnically diverse than the larger population of internet users. Indeed, non-whites and English-speaking Hispanics are more likely to be bloggers than white Anglos. There’s a dissertation topic for some sociology grad student to figure out.

Bloggers skew young, with 54% under 30 – not a surprise, but I suspect that will change as the Myspace generation gets older – and they are evenly split on gender lines. There’s not much information in the Pew report about class, though the fact that half of bloggers live in the suburbs hints that they are strongly middle-class, which would match the broader population.

Who are the bloggers? Well, in the U.S., they seem to represent a good snapshot of Americans. For future historians seeking to study U.S. popular history in the early twenty-first century, this is great.

Next up – how Pew got had by its survey respondents.

New book: Uses of Blogs

Over at Crooked Timber, John Quiggin has noted the publication of Uses of Blogs, edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs. Looking at the contributors and reading the online introductory essay, this book would appear to be an examination of blogs from the point of view primarily of sociologists, information specialists, economists, lawyers, and psychologists - not an historian in the bunch, as far as I can tell. Not a shock - blogging is only a few years old, not yet in the viewfinder of most historians. Heck, my own research area is on material 40 to 50 years old, which makes me a student of "contemporary history." But whenever historians get around to using blogs as sources, they will want to read just this kind of thing, because Uses of Blogs is an attempt to get at basic questions of authorship - who are the bloggers, who are the blog readers, and what are the writing and reading for? These are always the first questions an historian asks when examining a document for the first time. I want to say a lot about this, and I have few comments about the introductory essay in Uses of Blogs, but for now I will simply say I like the turn of phrase "mass amateurization of publishing," (p. 3), which is a pretty fit description of blogging.

Blogs and history

“…blogs as artifacts and documents of history….”

What the heck does that mean? A lot of things, only one of which I’ll explore now. Historians and paleontologists having something in common, and it’s not just that we study the past. Both professions seek to reconstruct entire worlds with only fragmentary evidence. I’ll concede that the paleontologists have it worse, but we historians face a dilemma, in that most people’s voices are lost to history. Overwhelmingly, the voices we hear are those of the elites, and even then, only a fraction of the elites. Nearer to the present, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have more sources from non-elite authors, diaries, letters, and the like, but even there, only a fraction of a few. Say you’re old enough to remember the Eighties – how much of the details of your own life do you remember? How many of them can you document? You think any historian will be able to document what you can’t? Maybe, but don’t count on it. But then there were blogs….

Do you remember what you had for lunch yesterday? How ‘bout last Thursday? Jane Espenson knows. Well, she knows what she had, not you. And so do I (about her, not myself). In fact, I know a whole lot about Jane, most notably, her lunch habits and, oh yeah, her take on the scriptwriting business. If her blog archives somehow make it to 2106, I guarantee some grad student will be doing their dissertation on Jane’s lunches, and whoever else out there is posting their daily lunch habits. (It’s a big if, I’d point out.)

And that’s the kind of thing I want to talk about. Next up – beginning a discussion on blogs as sources for studying popular history.

Today: Smoked chicken enchiladas. Yesterday - no clue.