<h3>Show me your Context, Baby</h3>

"Show me your context..."

Tolling for the searching ones, on their speechless, seeking trail | For the lonesome-hearted lovers with too personal a tale | An' for each unharmful, gentle soul misplaced inside a jail | An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Kate Baggott's essay, Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs won the Editor's Choice Award in trAce and Writers for the Future's New Media Article Writing Competition.

Show me your context, baby. I already know the world you live in; tell me only how you see it.

I am among the most demanding readers of blogs, or web logs, or on-line journals, or whatever you choose to call the daily missives individuals post on the web. I want the whole story: the profane, the sacred and the essential facts. These are the demands we make of great literature too, but that comparison is too limiting.

[...]

Through blogs I have found another conduit into the awesome responsibility of being human. This electronic nervous system of interconnected thoughts highlights the individuals in the masses while strengthening the ties that bind us. In the tales of your cancer treatments, in your accounts of trips home, in your assertions that your fathers are all assholes, I have found solace and fresh understanding.

You are, like me, mostly a powerless human with only your unique perspective to save you from feelings of helplessness in the face of despair. These are times when you can declare that the universe is not unfolding as it should. These are times when you know exactly who to blame and you should demand that other voices join your plea for sanity. This is when you blog and I read you. more...

The above extract does not do justice to Kate's short essay. It should be read in full. It was posted to the Web a month ago, but I picked up on it only now, at cogdogblog. Leaving the "blogging as journalism" debate aside, Baggott writes blogging pretty much as I’ve come to understand it over two years.


Phillipi: Cira, Lunga and Mpumalelo [Photo: Fred Clarke]

Starry-eyed an' laughing as I recall when we were caught | Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended | As we listened one last time an' we watched with one last look | Spellbound an' swallowed 'til the tolling ended

The "blogging as journalism" debate? Ah fuck it. To give that one a wrap, here's Andie Miller, as quoted by Jay Rosen in his BloggerCon essay, Journalism and Weblogging in their Corrected Fullness:

South African Andie Miller, If Kapuscinski had a weblog. "Whether we call them journalists or not, what bloggers invariably possess – that much of journalism with its deadlines and word-counts has killed in its reporters – is an enthusiasm for telling the stories. If a young Kapuscinski was starting out today, and publishing his writing on a weblog, perhaps we wouldn't call it journalism. Perhaps we would call it "literary reportage", as Kapuscinski himself describes his writing. But whatever we called it, we would be richer for his desire to experience the world, and his passion for sharing those stories with us." more...

With Steve Himmer's lengthy essay The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature further illuminating the medium, it's clear blogging has a future.

The weblog, though not universally or always intentionally, resists commoditization in a number of ways. The play of time, and change over time, make impossible the capture and containment of the weblog as a "complete" work—there is always more to come, so whatever particular fragment is torn from its context for commoditization or display necessarily and insistently refers to its own incompletion, via links to earlier pieces and other sites, or references to information about the topic or author contained in an earlier post or promised to appear in a later one (other posts written by Delacour further explicating his relationship with Ikuko, for instance). The weblog as a work, and therefore each individual post contained within it and, too, each link to any other weblog, is unavoidably altered by the addition of a new post and the creation of new possibilities for traversing and interpreting the labyrinth of the work. more...

The literary side of the Web is either under-rated or overlooked (some 'communities' remind me of latter-day Bloomsbury Groups). There are many good practising literary sites and rogue or renegade writers and they, rather than the 'journalistic' sites, hold the medium's greatest promise.

Okay, given some experience of blogging and a healthy lack of respect for the human race, I do not believe—as Kate does—New Media blogs represent our "our one true hope". We of the Twenty-First Century media squash "true hope" without second thought. We are, after all and as Kate notes, human. But, a self-admitted blog lover in the throes of her spring romance, she frames her hope in irresistibly good taste and a sensible perspective. It is conceivable, albeit unlikely, that we'll save this medium from the banal mediocrity of mainstream media.

For my money, it's deteriorated considerably in two years and I'm not completely to blame.

It's difficult to believe Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs has not been heavily linked to by every two-line, link-whoring, traffic-chasing ego freak now cluttering the Blogosphere. But neither have Steve's or Andie's essays been picked up and explored. Mind you, on consideration, thank God they haven't...

Let's savor our momentary innocence.

Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed | For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse | An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe | An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing.

Bob Dylan | Chimes of Freedom