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March 02, 2007

Live Blogging: Threat or menace?

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 ]

Posted by D. Weinberger at March 2, 2007 12:04 PM


Comments

This is a great "beme" on the very nature of blog-propelled memes!

Posted by: Ari | March 2, 2007 12:43 PM


Hi David!

Jennifer seemed a little bit astonished about some of the things I said about the whole continuous partial attention thing. I think that most non-bloggers/geeks would be. I think I remember a member of my family seeing the entry to which Jennifer refers and saying, "You really have to tell them not to bring their laptops??!!"

Well, yes.

Posted by: Wendy | March 6, 2007 10:53 AM


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