What Do Blogs Do?

My idea is to make tomorrow's class a little looser and to let you get to know one another a little. So bring any food you like ... to eat and/or share. If the package stores are open, I will bring a little wine.

The emergence stuff is, I admit, a little arcane. What I'm realy looking for are more models for the information we're reading. How do you "flow around" in the blogosphere and what kind of learning or self-informing does that facilitate? What kind of art?

The important part of the Johnson interview is this second page, where he talks about signal-to-noise and the whole problem of organizing and filtering everything that's out there without having the blogosphere begin to resemble the more authority-based "top-down" structure of the mainstream media. How do you preserve spontaneity, democracy and serendipity?

Last week we spoke to two people who are working in the tightly focused area of a campaign, in which information is funneled and concentrated and used like a laser. Certainly, blogs can work that way, but an awful lot of bloggers seem to be trying to do something else. Something more general and semi-private and random.

But what is it? What are they trying to do? (That link goes, for some reason, to the comments. You have to scroll up to Eric's virus post.) (Spazeboy explains why in a comment.)

And what about the idea of literary (or other) art itself? We traditionally think of the painter in his garret, but some of the bloggers seem to need to do their stuff in front of the audience. That is, the art evolves over the course of several posts and comment threads. Is there any sense in which that IS the art? This blogger would say yes, I think. Her art is the creation of community and the pulling together of comments.