When you hear Regine speaking in public you'd be prepared for her modesty. It comes up often in the presentation that you start to wonder if she's really the owner of the incredibly popular We Make Money Not Art blog or not. She really is and at the same time she embodied the controversial blog revolution in an iconic way. Her success didn't happen by accident (as she tried to convince us) but is firmly grounded in her personal ironical narrative and the clearness of her language, coupled with instinctive editorial skills. She outlined her blog and some of her editorial choices, including the precariousness of the advertisement's revenues (the main funding model for blogs). After her description the blogosphere seemed even more embodying the society of spectacle, for better or worst. Question time lasted for one hour and, apart from the curiousness about her blog details, some unknown scenario arises. The 'authority' of blogs, for example, still heavily questioned by press offices (that treat blogs very differently from the printed press). This was at the center of a lively discussion, enhancing the antipodes: the academic publishing with printed and unique references (ISBN, volumes and issues numbers) and the unstoppable prolificacy of the web content production that most of the time lives comfortably without any 'official' reference to sport. The Google-Technorati duopoly in establishing the 'value' of a blog was also unveiled in its more subtle mechanisms. We have to keep in mind that they are business, and not really public ranking agencies, so we have to be very critic with their changing-on-fly, algorithm-induced variations and the tremendous consequences that this could induce in a single blog sustainability. Regine in the end has a controversial relationship with the printed page. She loves books and magazines, but she hates to write for them, and she's worried about a possible printed anthology of the tons of writings she's already done. What she fears is that things on print can't be corrected. People usually tends to indentify her with her blog, but meeting her personally has outlined a person that well beyond appearances is always able to manage her life, her cultural production and to mantain them free, with or without the million of readers that monthly check her blog.
Alessandro Ludovico
Con etiqueta:
blog, blogosphere, documenta12, paper and pixel
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