Live Blogging: Threat or menace?
March 2nd, 2007 by David Weinberger
The Wall Street Journal has a piece by Jennifer Saranow about live blogging personal events that’s entertaining, provocative, and ends with an anecdote about the Accordian Guy, Wendy Koslow and AKMA.
It’s a nicely done piece, although I’m not satisfied with its main explanation of why people live blog everything from births to funerals. Jennifer seems to view it as a type of narcissism. But all writing in public is narcissistic —”Hey, listen to me!” — and I’m not sure that live blogging is especially so. For one thing, frequently live bloggers are writing about other people’s events.
I don’t have an alternative hypothesis to offer. Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces. Or something. [Tags: live_blogging blogging blogs wsj everything_is_miscellaneous ]