Just What Am I Looking For as I Study Blogs?

Hi again,
This is a question that just-ramblin asked in response to an earlier posting. It's a good question.

It's tempting to wimp out and say that I don't know since blogs are such a new phenomenon--but that would be wimping out. So I'll try to share a few thoughts without lapsing into scholarly jargon.

First I should note, though, that when I began my research project (which is supported by Oregon State University's Humanities Center) my focus wasn't on bloggers but rather on what I'm calling citizen reviewers, such as the foks who write reviews on Amazon.com or Blogcritics.org. I got interested in citizen reviewers because of the challenge they represent to traditional forms of expertise and authorship that have informed the publishing/literary world for several centuries.

Here's what I mean. (What follows is a gross overgeneralization.) During the Middle Ages and Renaissance authors were supported primarily through the church and the patronage system, where aristocrats would commission literary works from writers. The reading public was quite limited, so the question of who was an author (much less a good author) was determined by a small elite of clergy and aristocrats.

With the rise of the middle class and the collapse of the patronage system, the whole system for deciding who was an author and evaluating that author's work collapsed. Lots more people were claiming authorship, and the reading public expanded significantly. This was when the system of book reviewing was developed--and it developed with great speed and intensity. (The development of the printing press played a key role in these changes, just as the development of the web is fueling the blogosphere.)

Suddenly aristocratic elites no longer determined who deserved to be called a real author (versus a hack writer). Instead, cultural elites--writers publishing reviews in well known journals--were.

This system has existed from the 18th century or so until the present time. As journalism developed, similar kinds of expertise also developed--hence the prestige of The New York Times versus that of my local paper, the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

Bloggers and citizen reviewers represent a significant challenge to these forms of authority and expertise. That's why I'm interested in them.

Do these new forms of communication represent a utopian or near-utopian alternative to traditional forms of media and communication control?

Or are they if not dystopian then problematic in one or another way? What about the standards (aesthetic and journalistic) that have been part of the traditional literary scene and media? What are we to make of all the bad writing that appears in blogs? How should we (or should we?) evaluate blogs and citizen reviews?

Why do people write blogs and citizen reviews, especially when their readership is limited?

How do people writing blogs and citizen reviews establish their credibility? (This is key to traditional forms of communication.)

But enuf said. Ask a professor a question, and I'm afraid you're likely to get a very long answer.......