The Language of Blogs

Today Today Today

Thomas Jones in the London Review of Books says, 'Books and blogs, if they’re doing their jobs properly, are as different as two kinds of published text can be.'  So a print collection of blog entries, Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web is 'on the face of it, an early contender for most pointless book of the year'.  This is because blogs are written and published quickly, and are open to revision and response, while books are not.  Blogs are timely:  that is why people apologise for periods without posts (none of that here), why way threads date quickly, so that it seems odd to post your comment long after everyone else, and why even very good blog entries collected in books seem so thin, thinner even than collected journalism.

Jones says that the best entries in the book are those from Samuel Pepys's diary from the 1660s.  I've now subscribed to the feed from the Samuel Pepys Diary site maintained by Phil Gyford , and I find they do indeed work well as daily e-mails, sent on the date they were written (so I find that on the corresponding date in January 1664, he had a cold too). They are about the right length (never more than a screen) and they are devoted to such details as what he had for breakfast, who was at a meeting, quick bits of sex, and (most recently) lying awake all night because he thinks burglars might get in.  The e-mailed entries work so well that I can't imagine reading them straight through in bound volumes (though I may try listening to the audiobook).  Of course Pepys was not putting his diary entries out in public, but he had set himself the daily task of recording dailiness, and that is what makes him such a good blogger.

Dailiness is also the principle of a site I've mentioned before, Bill Lamin's blog posting the letters from the front in World War by his grandfather Private Harry Lamin.   The site presents itself as Harry's blog, so on the Profile page, he lists himself as 120 years old.  This would be like any other archive of Great War letters, except that they are posted on the blog on the day corresponding to the day they were sent.  The irregularity reproduces the sense of waiting every day for news, and the uncertainty and open-endedness they had for the recipients in his family. They are not daily letters, but the blog ties us into the time of the writer, as the Pepys Diary site does. 

The excellent WNYC podcast On the Media  has twice drawn attention to a project by the Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy (and now carried on by Ruben Vives), The Homocide Report.  Leovy has been reporting the bare facts of every single homicide reported in LA County, every day (and there is, on average, more than one murder a day).  One would think any newspaper would do that, but of course any newspaper treats some murders as newsworthy, those involving notable people, photogenic victims, grisly results, or repeated patterns;  others are just items on the police blotter.  Here every victim gets more or less the same attention (depending only on how much is known in the immediate aftermath):  an area of the city and an address, the victim's name, gender, race or ethnicity, and age, a time, the cause of death, and a not very flattering photo.  The deliberate flatness of the reporting contrasts with the emotional tributes posted in the comments on some (but not all) entries, reminding us that these sometimes rather grim looking people had daughters, customers, neighbours, old friends from high school.  The Homocide Report is heartbreaking in a way a newspaper is not.  What makes it such a moral project is that the reporter gives every victim the same care and attention, every day, just as soon as they know anything at all.  No waiting to see if it is a good story, and no shaping into a rich novelistic narrative.  Different as it is, Jill Leovy's resolution has similarities with the resolutions of Phil Gyford (for Samuel Pepys) and Bill Lamin (for Private Harry Lamin), to focus on today.

Taking it back

'Also there was a man who looked like Jean-Paul Sartre, only uglier, with a limp, and was Jean-Paul Sartre.'  That's from Susan Sontag's description of a party in Paris on 19 February 1959, from diary excerpts published in the Guardian (14/9/06).  Sontag's sentence raises a linguistic issue that is important in blogs - when and to what degree can one unsay something once one has said it? One aspect of this problem is called defeasibility, the way some categories of statements can be cancelled without contradiction.  (One summary is in Stephen Levinson's Pragmatics (Cambridge University Press, 1983).  Implicatures can be cancelled.  Sontag did not say explicitly that the man wasn't Jean-Paul Sartre, but if we assume she was observing the Maxim of Quantity, then we draw an implicature (that he wasn't) from her statement that he 'looked like' Sartre.  She can cancel the implicature, and we (or whoever was supposed to be reading this private diary) won't think she is talking nonsense;  we might think that the real Sartre doesn't look quite like what she had imagined.

I noticed this entry because I am particularly interested in how defeasibilty work with verbs of perception.  Some of the first eye-witnesses reports of 9/11 to be reported on CNN said they saw a small plane hit the tower.  Witnesses of the shooting of what turned out to be an innocent man in the Stockwell underground station in London, after the bombings in July 2005, said they saw a man wearing a padded jacket, and said that they saw him jump the turnstile.  Witnesses often get things wrong.  Could then then say, 'I saw a little plane hit the tower, but it was a 737' or 'I saw him jump the turnstile, but he didn't'?

The problem is related to the wider issue of self-correction in blogs and other media.  Of course newspapers have long had spaces devoted to correcting their errors;  there is a web-site devoted to these corrections at Regret the Error.  Newspapers correct the next day, or later, often after a complaint, or a word from lawyers.  Blogs would seem to have the advantage that they can correct immediately, in the same place as the error, and still show the error, for instance by putting strike-throughs on the now outdated or corrected text.  The strike-through reminds us of the provisionality of facts, while the print of newspapers may suggest a definitive account.  But I wonder if the provisionality accorded to facts in blogs has its own dangers.  A statement can be quoted in other blogs, linked to, commented on, and even if it is taken back an hour after it was posted, it continues to circulate. 

But don't quote me, because I'm not sure about this.

Talk about blogs and news

This is a paper I gave today in a conference on 'Debating the Knowledge-Based Economy' at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Lancaster. It is a further development of ideas from Chapter 6. There were also some interesting papers on diviners in Japan, and on CGI professionals in film and advertising.

Updates on blogs and news

Two useful lists of links, Israeli and US, to add to my post on Lebanon war blogs:

On the Face on 'The most blogged war . . .'

and the excellent Poynter journalism site on 'primarily conservative and pro-Israel' blog critics of media reporting.

There is a good overview of blogs on the Mumbai bombings at Global Voices Online.

Location Location Location

Last night the UN finally announced an agreed text for a ceasefire in Lebanon. It is a complex issue, and the language of the debate is getting rather repetitive, so a BBC-listener-Guardian-reader like me might want to know more from perspectives nearer the events, and blogs might seem to be the way to find out.  My search for new perspectives made me think about two issues: 

1) how does one find news from somewhere in the blogosphere?

2) how do blogs mark, in their language, the somewhere that they are from?

Getting the news:  My first discovery was that if one wants pictures and figures and an overview, the events themselves are probably better covered by what bloggers call the ‘mainstream media’, newspapers and broadcast news services.  Blogs provided important sources after the Southeast Asian Tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, and the Mumbai bombings (see my posting) but apparently they do not provide much new information on the situation in Lebanon (see a comment on YouTube at WNYC's On the Media). What they do provide are perspectives, interpretations, speculation, and invective from people involved in the events.  Maybe these outpourings are just what those of us who have a fixed view on the events need, but they make for uncomfortable and not always illuminating reading.

I started by searching Technorati with "Lebanon" and "Beirut" as tags.  Oddly, what one gets then are a lot of Americans, mostly rightwing, holding forth on the place of these events in their larger global picture.  That wasn’t what I was looking for.  So I looked for blogs that put Lebanon or Beirut in their self-descriptions.  That gave a more interesting list that included blogs such as The Beirut Spring, Blogging Beirut, Across the Bay, and Sabbah’s Blog.  These have lists of other Lebanese blogs in English, not overlapping much (of course there are also many in Arabic).  On the other side of the Blue Line, I came across Live from an Israeli Bunker (which is on the Pajamas Media list of mostly rightwing mostly US blogs, so it probably gets a lot of attention). 

I probably could have saved myself a lot of this trouble if I had gone first to Global Voices Online.  It offers notes by regional blogger-editors who follow what they call ‘bridge blogs’ reporting on their countries to the wider world.  Their summaries point out various interesting blogs I would have missed in a search of tags.  (And they do give some information on who these editors are).  It led me, for instance, to Cold Desert, which is a personal diary blog that turned into a blog of the war, and that contains some of the kind of details of daily life that made some of the Iraqi blogs so effective. It also has a list of other blogs focusing on the war that does not overlap at all with the blogs above. There were also lists in some of the mainstream news outlets, such as this on a CBC.ca (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) article on blogs in the Middle East Crisis.  (Interestingly, it doesn't overlap much with either of my previous lists).

Location matters.  Lebanon has had a vast diaspora, so there are articulate English-writing Lebanese around the world, and there are similarly people around the world who identify with Israel.  Blogs do not usually say just where the blogger is writing from.  I would normally be interested in opinions wherever they were written down, but here I specifically wanted the views of people who were witnessing events firsthand.  Sabbah is in Bahrain, Richard Anderson of The Bliss Street Journal gives his location as Beirut and the US;  both present the blogosphere, not the local.  More surprisingly, the blogs that are pointedly local, such as Cold Desert and Live from an Israeli Bunker, spend much of their time on commentary on media bias and commentaries on commentaries that could have been written anywhere.  They have the right to write whatever they want, in the bunker or under the bombs, but for that kind of commentary on commentary on commentary I have other sources.  I’m beginning to think I’ve missed the point in thinking that blogs could serve any of the functions of the media in reporting news.

Placing blogs:  Let’s look at some posts where the bloggers refer to the immediate place (and with it, the immediate time).  The sense of place may be given subtly, not just by place names and descriptions, but by definite references.  In the examples I can find, they usually use this immediacy to justify some wider assertion.

Example 1:

The first post (16 July 2006) on Live from an Israeli Bunker (signals of location in italics)

So Where We Are

I'd rather not say where we are exactly but its close to where the rockets hit haifa today.
I woke up a few minutes before 9 in the morning and looked out the window for some reason, then the siren started. 
So I got dressed, went stright into my brothers room and picked him up and moved away from outside walls.
We heard the bombs go off in the distance and turned on the TV.
After a few minutes we headed down into the bunker and this is where I am right now. With a laptop and a very faint but so far adequte wifi signal.
I thought this blog is a good idea, I'll be taking notes and posting whenever possible. Perhaps this will get picked up by the media, perhaps not. But hopefully it will give an idea of how its like to the people who read it.
Update soon.

First, there is the reminder that topographical information can be of military importance – so he doesn’t want to say just where he is. But he starts with a link to a wider event, already known to us, that frames his account of his day.  Then he uses a lot of definite noun phrases (‘the window’) to place us in a world of already known specifics. Having established that, he moves down into the bunker, so we have two places, the world of normal life and the bunker, ‘where I am, with just enough signal to post a message. The ‘right now’ is a kind of deictic (pointing) reference in time that goes with these references to place, giving a sense of immediacy. That image, of a young man in a bunker with a laptop, marks the theme of the blog. Later posts occasionally remind those of us who live in safer surroundings of the dangers and disruptions and routines of life under the threat of rockets.  But most of the later posts are the kinds of repetitions of justifications and comments on media bias that are regularly posted around the world.  The initial scene in the bunker serves as an entitlement to say these things.

Example 2:

A recent post on The Beirut Spring (Friday 4 August 2006):

Just now, Israel bombed 4 important bridges that link Beirut to North Lebanon. I used 3 of them just Yesterday
[photo of a television screen labeled LBC, with image of people in rubble]
The bombing targeted two bridges in Maameltein, one in Batroon and one in Halet.
I actually used 3 of those bridges when I took my fiancé to Jounieh yesterday. I could have been killed like that family that was in a car and fell in the hole formed in the Batroun bridge.
Land access to Beirut from the North is now completely destroyed.
For the record, those bridges link the Sunni North to the Christian Center of Lebanon. There are no Hezbollah supporters whatsoever in those areas.
This proves the point that Israel is using Hezbollah as an excuse to destroy Lebanon.

As in Example 1, the ‘just now’ signals the immediacy.  Then there is a strategic alternation of perspective.  Sentences 1, 3, and 6 could be taken from any news agency report;  they are from a global perspective.  Sentences 2, 4, and 5 give his experience of these places:  he went there just yesterday, he was with his fiancé (emphasising the vulnerability), and he imagines himself in the situation in a photo with which we are assumed to be familiar (‘that family’). The two sentences beginning ‘For the record’ gives information that is presumably shared by other people who know Beirut, that he gives for the information of readers unfamiliar with Lebanon.  In this case it is local knowledge (about which groups live in the areas connected by the bridges) that is offered as support for his conclusion about the intention behind the raids. 

Example 3:

The latest post in Cold Desert (12 August 2006)

Today I woke up at 6:15 AM, israeli warplanes expressed their feud by targeting four pillars in the power transformer station. Before this, the power used to be available between 4 and 6 hours per day. Now, people have zero hours per day, unless they have a power generator for their home/shop/neighborhood.
Why did the IDF decide to target a power transformer station in Saida after 5 hours from declaring the UN resolution, I have no idea. I tried to figure out why would it target a power station in the 32nd day of the war, but I couldn't figure it out. The only explanation is that the IDF want to cause more destruction to the civilian infrastructure, it wants just revenge from the innocent civilians.
With the lack of electric power, I will not be able to blog or email as I used to. I am limited by the few hours of electricity that the power generator provides for the neighborhood. (Remember we have a fuel crisis so they cannot turn on the power generator for longer hours.)
In the meantime, if you want to be updated about war, I encourage you to check my personalized list of Blogs about Israeli War on Lebanon.
Peace

As in the first two examples, the posting begins by signalling its immediacy, ‘today . . . 6:15 AM’.  The use of the definite article in ‘the power transformer station’ signals that it is a local, known entity;  that is then rephrased for readers outside as ‘a power transformer station in Saida’.  He then moves to more general conclusions, a metonymy, this event stands for many actions in the war.  Finally, we go back to the immediacy of the posting, like the Israeli getting Wi-Fi signal in the bunker.  But in this case, the event reported stops the blog.

Example 4:

Finally we could look at the words I have italicised from The Language Guy, a very interesting blog by the linguist Michael Geis, Professor Emeritus at Ohio State (I’ll discuss some language blogs in a later post).

The most significant change between past "dust ups" between Israel and its apparently implacable foes, Hamas and Hezbollah, is that both are parts of the governments in the countries they launched their incursions from. Hezbollah has minority representation in the government of Lebanon but Hamas has a very strong position in Palestine. Americans will recognize this situation. It parallels the hosting of Al Queda by the Taliban government of Afghanistan. The governments of Lebanon and Palestine are complicit with the actions of these groups and I, for one, don't blame Israel for attacking these countries as they have done for it is not so different from the thoroughly laudable invasion in my opinion of Afghanistan by the US to take away Al Queda's "safe house," so to speak.

What stuck in my throat here was the sentence, ‘Americans will recognize the situation’.  I did a Google Blog search on the phrase ‘Americans will recognize” (Professor Geis’s blog is the third entry) and found that it is usually modified, ‘most Americans will recognize’ or even ‘true Americans will recognize’. Does this unmodified use say that Americans share a view of events in distant countries by virtue of being Americans? The verb recognize implies that the view they share is what is really there.  (If I say ‘I recognized John’ you will think it was indeed John).  I would question the view of Afghanistan, and the application of the analogy to Lebanon, but is this because I live in the UK, surrounded by rather different political views and news from those in the US?  It may be that blogs tend to push writers to take this stylistic stance of speaking for a well-defined perspective, shared knowledge, a shared identity – or a place. 

After the bombs

I’ve been following Amit Varma’s blog India Uncut.  It and other blogs did excellent work in gathering information after the Mumbai bombings on 11 July.  So I was puzzled that the Indian government blocked access to many blogs just days later.  (I was pleased that typepad.com was considered worth blocking, along with blogspot.com and Geocities).  It was as if the British government had decided, in June 1940 after Dunkirk, that now was the time to get rid of those little boats that pose such a security risk.

It turns out that the situation was more complicated:  the Indian government had asked the ISPs to block a dozen blogs that they said supported terrorist activities, and the ISPs over-reacted by blocking everything.  The government wasn’t even aware that they had blocked thousands of blogs, not 12 (it was said that all bloggers on a platform share an IP address – is that true?).  The more dedicated blog readers soon found a way around the block through a site in Pakistan (the irony of this was not lost on Indian bloggers).  After a few days the block was sorted out, but it leaves some questions:  whether blogs can be easily blocked, whether they should be blocked when they have inflammatory material (or whether it is better to have such material in a public and easily searchable place), whether other countries will try this sort of censorship in the name of security. 

But I want to go back to the kind of work India Uncut and others did for a couple days.  I first became aware of the serious uses of blogs and wikis after the Southeast Asian Tsunami in 2004.  They proved their value again after the 7 July London Bombings and Hurricane Katrina in September 2005.  Blogs and wikis are ideally suited to such emergencies because they

• can be set up quickly (broadcast or press reporters take a while to get there)
• are updatable (newspapers work around daily deadlines, and even 24-hour rolling news comes back to the story slowly in the cycle of news)
• allow for comments so that they can be corrected quickly (important when there are so many rumours circulating)
• have people reporting from all over (broadcast and press news is limited to the few places where they have correspondents)
• are big (so they can include as much information as is available in text or image or video)
• are searchable (not sorted by the hierarchy of newspaper or broadcast news agendas, favouring the famous places, elite persons, and most horrific photos)

In fact, blogs seem to work against almost everything we teach as ‘news values’ in media studies  courses:  since there’s no defined audience and no limitation on space, readers can be left to search for the information they value, perhaps the name of someone they are worried about, or pictures of a street.  They allow for comment in the discussions afterwards, and they allow for metacomments on other reports and on reporting in general.  There is a downside to this:  blogs can also become channels for rumours and misinformation.  In the days after the emergency, the traditional news media get better and better, as they begin to make sense of what has happened, while the blogs flake off into various detailed strands that may interest only a few people.  But the messy look of a blog during an emergency may be a truer text in some ways than the big photo and headline of a newspaper (for a typical US example from the day).

India Uncut may give us some idea of how an emergency is conveyed in the style of a blog.  Amit Varma’s usual posting is in what might be called ‘Instapundit links’ (I’ll come up with a better name for this), with just a heading and just a phrase suggesting some sort of stance on the linked material.  He sometimes quotes a bit, to focus on some particularly outrageous or amusing aspect of the story, but usually one has to click the link, and the wit arises from the dialogue he sets up with some text that was created for another purpose.  All this back an forth is dropped in the emergency, and he provides something more like a news aggregator, grouping together different sources of information as they appear.

Here’s the first of his posts:

At least four six seven* bomb blasts reported so far in Mumbai, not much on the web as I type this here are some reports: Rediff, NDTV, Times of India, BBC, Mid Day, the Guardian, CNN. These come right after blasts in Srinagar.

The TV channels are full of pictures, and cliches like "lifeline of Mumbai" and so on. One anchor asks his correspondent if this is a terrorist attack, as if he'd know five minutes after reaching the blast site. Phonelines are down across the city, though SMSs from outside are coming in. More later.

Latest reports: 20 deaths at Matunga Road(thanks n), 15 at Sion/Matunga. These are via TV, might be unreliable.

(*Mira Road, Jogeshwari, Khar, Matunga Road, Borivali, Bhayandar, Bandra: all across the Western line, at rush hour.)

The present tense, the crossing out and updating, the note with the names of stations, the gradually added details, the elliptical notes (‘More later’), all convey a sense of the uncertainty of this information.  His comment on broadcast news is to criticize it for fitting this event into a stereotypical format, providing a false sense of certainty.  (I was also annoyed with the BBC radio reporting the next day, pressing interviewees to give their opinions on which group had planted the bombs).

The posting is updated through the day, leading finally to a posting at 4 am the next day that comments on the confusions about reports of exact locations, lists Indian and British news sources and a Flickr group for pictures, lists blogs, ad finally gives a blog address for updated information about tracing survivors and others affected by the blasts.  Then, the next day, he signs off, and goes back to his usual blog. 

By the way, Varma's list took me to some other interesting blog comments on the bombs, including Sepia Mutiny, Desipundit, Ultrabrown, and CuriousGawker (who's in Philadelphia, and has a funny response to US right-wing blogger Hugh Hewitt).