Whither the “litblog”? Blogs were once at the center of the online cultural ecosystem. The appetite for such work has diminished... What Has the MEdia Dragon Blog Wrought?
That we live in a ubiquitously connected electronic world is by now such a firm fact of 21st century life that it hardly seems worth noting, no matter how much we worry it may be altering the nature of human experience in ominous ways.
Diminished attention spans and a narrowed conception of social relations may indeed be among the consequences of the ascendancy of the internet, but there is currently not much reason to believe its reach will soon be curtailed by our concerns about these matters.
The story of how the world we inhabit increasingly became a cyberspace is certainly incomplete, although that space is likely to become more all-encompassing, as the serviceability of online technology continues to be extended and refined.
A recent book focusing on the story so far, Extremely Online(Taylor Lorenz), contends that the internet has taken its present form not so much through the efforts of those developing the technology but the collective efforts of users who through their resourceful adaptations of the possibilities offered by the internet enhanced its character and shaped its ethos.
Although the book emphasizes the evolving economic dominance of the internet and the cultural impact of "influencers," it maintains that "the web" served as a means of expression not previously so widely available and empowered enterprising individuals to create novel forms of communication and association.
If the influencer addressing popular subjects of widespread interest could ultimately accumulate a very large audience, smaller communities of interest might also begin to appear through this new mode of connection. Thus arose what came to be called the "blogosphere," that domain of cyberspace occupied by versions of the weblog, the form of online communication that became the first manifestation of the web's capacity to produce new channels of discourse that bypassed the officially sanctioned practices to be found in print publications.
One of the variants of the blog was the literary weblog, or "litblog," which, as the name suggests, was concerned with books and literary culture, although eventually some litblogs focused even more particularly on various eras of literary history or on specific literary forms.
Litblogs still exist, but many of the blogs that initially brought attention to the phenomenon of litblogging do not, or have been modified into more general literary websites. At first, litblogs were pretty closely tied to the established print media that devoted space to books coverage and other literary news. Blog posts were usually quite brief, often mostly links to print sources, and were largely intended to provide wider access to developments in the literary world.
🌎 As more readers became aware of the early blogs, and the number of blogs began to proliferate (often launched by these very readers), the comments section of litblogs became more active as well, as the common practice of offering a "blogroll" identifying other blogs and bloggers engaged in what increasingly seemed a common project, served to create an informal community of readers, whose interest in books, and literature more generally, were evidently not being adequately satisfied by the mainstream literary press.
Soon enough, then, just linking to reviews or noting daily literary developments started to seem a limited use of the weblog's potential, and litblogs began to feature more substantial commentary, still mostly informal in tone and relatively modest in length, but attempting to augment the consideration of literary matters rather than simply relating it through links.
This happened as more people joined the litblogosphere, from a variety of backgrounds but seeming to share a belief that the blog as a medium presented an opportunity for both a broader and deeper engagement with books and writing than the existing hierarchy of the "mainstream media" could accommodate. Among the new bloggers were academic literary critics testing out the form, some as a forum for amplifying their academic work, but others writing about literature more directly, either as a supplement to academic writing or in some cases an alternative to academic criticism in its then current version.
I myself belonged to this group of converts to the litblog (although I decided to adopt the form relatively early, when only a few of those who would become the most recognized of the early litbloggers had already established their blogs, bloggers such as Maud Newton, Laila Lalami, and Mark Sarvas).
My goal in starting The Reading Experience from the beginning was to see if serious literary criticism could be carried out on a blog. As I tried to suggest through the name I chose for the blog, I was attempting neither to use the site as a way of providing a broader context for my work as an academic critic, nor to turn it into an outlet for an academic criticism modified to a new medium.
Instead I imagined the weblog and its growing audience as a potential opportunity to bridge differences between the kind of academic criticism I had learned to practice and a more general-interest criticism that attempted to reach a larger, less insular audience but emphasized the analytical as much as the evaluative.
I would not say that my motivation was strictly shared by other bloggers who helped expand the scope of the litblog.
My posts on The Reading Experience were likely the product of my own idiosyncratic notion of what a "literary" blog could be, although I did receive enough encouragement from readers and other bloggers about my approach--encouragement that indeed may have been prompted by a perception that what I was doing was something different--that I felt sufficiently motivated to do almost all of my writing on the blog (no more academic articles or lengthy literary essays pitched to whatever publication might seem a promising target).
At first I didn't really write many straight-out reviews, as the goal was not to reproduce mainstream book review discourse but to develop a less formalized kind of commentary that still offered more than facile judgments of either praise or disapproval…
At the least, however, the technology did make available an opportunity to create an "in-between" kind of literary discourse (in between a purely personal reading journal and officially sanctioned literary criticism) open to the unmediated discussion of books and writing, separate from the constraints imposed by established literary journalism as well as academic criticism.
(And when literary journalists and academic critics did come to participate in the blogosphere, it was usually according to the protocols attached to blogging, not the other way around, as at, for example, an "academic" blog called The Valve, to which I was a contributor for several years.)
But as audiences grew and the lure of profit beckoned (although we now know that this prospect has turned out to be an illusion), the technology changed ("improved"), and the conditions on the ground, so to speak, also inevitably changed, The blog would turn out to be only the initial step in transferring American literary culture online; the simple tools of blogging alone would prove inadequate to such an epochal task.
If literary blogging helped lead us to the much-expanded online network that now serves as the locus of establishment literary activity, this process has unfortunately left no place for blogging. Even with the current unsettled circumstances in both internet publishing and social media (publishers keep going out of business, social media keeps fragmenting),
I do not expect that litblogging as we knew it at the beginning will make any kind of significant comeback. Which is not to say that blogging will not survive, just that it won't again have the same king of salience to the direction literary culture takes as it briefly did in the nascent days of the blogosphere.
Bloggers will have to be satisfied with a medium that offers limited reach but allows them maximum freedom and infinite space to say what they have to say at whatever length, and perhaps find an audience who wants to hear it. This may be the most invaluable promise the blog made to writers in the first
