UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

enhanced in blogging, it apparently triumphs through the technology enabled by the internet; not
surprisingly, it has achieved comparably greater public effect and engagement. 140
The key implication for the purposes of this writing is that that commonplace book, diary and
blogging feature as technologies of memory and remembering and while the former was
geographically relatively limited, 141 blogging eventually became a worldwide practice,
professional and pastime, of keeping track of one‘s life, expressing and sharing thoughts and
ideas, political opining, reviewing the latest technical gadgets, unveiling the secrets of the joys of
baking etc. Blogging developed into a commonplace practice of participating/intervening/cocreating
public spaces. Not unimportantly, blogging was, alongside forums and mailing lists, one
of the first tools for creating and maintaining online communities in DME. In line with the
implications of the connectivity turn, blogging involves the relationship between the author and
the readers/commentators who engage in interaction around a topic or an event. They partake in
co-creating a virtual community and its own history, and hence also in sharing memories via
digital connectivity, which incidentally makes blogging a practice for creating, co-creating and
distributing memory.
Although in many cases blogging may not be explicitly memory-related or have an agenda of
creating a record of the past, the practice itself—through its formal organisation (e.g. the
chronology of entries)—is nevertheless conducive to forming a temporal structure and thus a
means to trace blogging activity. This is the necessary condition for ad hoc communities of
interest to be formed. And, with it also communities of memory. To a large extent blog (much like
any social activity), contrary to the implication of endless online audiences, develops over time a
more or less stable, not necessarily enormous, but an (at least occasionally) interacting community
of readers/visitors. 142
Blog as a Multimodal Mobile Media Object
The readership in this case are not just readers, but rather visitors or users who take part in
prosuming the blog‘s content available via Web 2.0 functionalities (commenting, following),
140 For instance, ―mom bloggers,‖ according to the Technorati State of the Blogosphere (SOTB) report has become an
influential blogger subgroup, topics include parenting and family, health, technology, etc., see
http://technorati.com/blogging/article/what-topics-and-trends-day-2/page-3/, accessed 8 August 2011.
141 Commonplacing was particularly popular in the 1800s (and later) Anglo and Romance world.
142 According to Jon Sobel‘s SOTB report, the topics people blog and primarily blog about are at 41 % and 18 %,
respectively, ―Personal Musings‖; 37 % and 9 % on ―Technology‖; 27 % and 9 % on ―Politics‖; 22 % and 3 % on
―Music‖; see Jon Sobel, ―WHAT: Topics and Trends – Day 2,‖ SOTB 2010,
http://technorati.com/blogging/article/what-topics-and-trends-day-2/page-2/, accessed 8 August 2011.
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