I think I’m struggling a bit to specify when I start getting worried – I think it’s when attempts to reflect on the medium seem… er… not as reflective as they should be – when they either take the form of something like proscriptive pronouncements, or when they fall into overgeneralised sociologisms. My fear is that these particular forms of discourse might have a chilling effect: I’ve certain seen people who have ceased blogging, who have themselves cited such discussions to say that the medium was now evolving into a direction such that they could no longer participate, etc. It’s an interesting case study, in a way, of how a kind of social constraint could operate in the absence of any effective enforcement mechanism…

But yes: I do agree that the purpose of a particular blog imposes its own set of more intrinsic constraints – one of the issues I was trying to reflect on at your site, in relation to my own purposes, as I think there probably is a level of intrinsic tension in what I’d to achieve here. And it is an open question, as you’ve suggested in various places, whether particular blogs are, so to speak, adequate to their purposes…

The issue of rhetoric – and the construction of an online persona or authorial voice – and how this interacts with a ritualised trope of authenticity, is an interesting one. My thoughts on the issue aren’t very well-organised at the moment. I have a strange check and balance on the construction of a rhetorical voice here, because a number of readers know me in person. This certainly doesn’t prevent glamourisation or the cultivation of a particular kind of rhetoric – it does, though, ensure that the discussion here occurs within certain parameters (as does the fact that I’m not blogging anonymously…).

I’ve wondered occasionally what, if anything, I might change if none of my readers knew me in person – probably nothing in terms of the theoretical content, I’d guess, but perhaps a bit in terms of the balance between theoretical and other content… I’ve wondered more frequently how readers who do know me in person think of my blog writing – whether they see any kind of disjoint between the “me” they know in person, and the “me” who writes here…

Regardless, the distinction between rhetorical (other-centric) and expressive may be at least somewhat problematic: perhaps I’ve just been hanging out at Larval Subjects too much, but I suspect that most of us express ourselves in and through our acts of relating to others… So the issue becomes more – and I take this to be your key point – the function served by the rhetoric of pure expressiveness – by the normative notion that this is what a blog is “supposed” to be: a discourse that, in its own way, can be as dogmatic as any set of proscriptive rules intended to make blogging safe for professional practice…

Apologies if this is very confused – I’m having a bit of a low sleep week… ;-)

That said, I can see some value in turning this critique back against the blogs themselves. Why do blogs fall into patterns of repetition, of needless whimsy, of jokes that fall down flat? I’m kidding, but I do think the tendency to decline into memes and empty verbiage creates some of the impulse to generalize.

I think of blogging rhetorically, for the reason (which seems fair enough) that I do have an audience, and couldn’t really have a blog without one. I don’t need to blog about what I ate for breakfast, unless I can think of something to say about that…because I already know what I ate, and it’s usually Cheerios. So I do think of the blog as a way of building relationships with readers, and that starts to impose rules on how the blog works.

Of course good blogs are always testing those limits; that’s an axiom borrowed from art, which is also engaged with an audience. That said, I do find that the fluid possibilities of blogging, and the imperative of free, spontaneous self-expression, are often covers for other things, such as exhaustion coupled with a desire to retain an audience, or desirable but embarrassing kinds of rhetoric. For example, many blogs which are apparently personal and confessional have a strong element of glamourization (I would include some of my own entries in this), which is actually rhetorical (Other-centric) rather than purely expressive.

For my part, I’m critically concerned with maintaining a useful self-consciousness and rigor, because I think that’s what’s makes a blog exciting. When we throw overboard any particular concern with what a blog can be (which is different from acknowledging different possible concerns), in favor of a sort of undifferentiated “bill of rights,” the result is the blogosphere becoming thinner, vaguer, and definitely less compelling.