My friend Mark recently witnessed a powerpoint presentation regarding blogging and how it could be the way that the Rest Of Us get our news in the future. This worries me for a number of reasons- it struck me that if blogs become our news outlets (and granted, I find little to no validity in the statement) then our already politicized lives can be posted and edited, just like Wikipedia. Then we read Foucault, and learned that the author function of the blogs are different than the people who technically attach their names to the writing itself. We don't "know" these people, so are they trustworthy individuals? I mean, granted, I didn't "know" Peter Jennings, but being an anchor for 20+ years gives someone more cred than some Webgeek typing his or her opinions and having anyone with a computer read that as "news".
My worry is that people will begin to take blogs as seriously as we do the BBC and the implications of this new medium. As I've been reading blogs, I tend to find those people who really think that commenting on the post, disagreeing with the blogger and verging (and sometimes crossing into) the profane. These people take the medium very seriously, clearly, and feel the need to editorialize on editorials that they think are news.
Furthermore, can we "type" people who engage in this kind of commentary? What is their author function? Are they really the people that they portray on the Internet, or are they using the anonymity of the Internet to be aggressive? Can we theorize blogs, and if so, what combination of theories would that include?
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Ok, here's the way to think about the author function: It's not that we can't know who these authors are really (which is what you seem to be saying) - it's that we collect a certain number of texts under a name as a way of describing them. It's not about not being able really to know who the author is, but rather that the author function is a description of what a certain number of texts do. So, for example, when we say that books are written by "Virginia Woolf" what we are saying is that these books are written with an interest in exploring interiority, domestic spaces, the individual psychologies of characters, etc. This is not to say that these are the only things that define these texts, but rather that these are easy signposts through which to identify them. On the other hand, texts like blogs, which cannot be grouped according to one neame (so, for example, one pseudonymous blog), don't actually have an author function. If we think about Dooce, for example, there is only one text. It's not a collection of texts that needs to be described, but one text that uses a pseudonym in order to provide a kind of "face" for the ideas that it promotes. In that case, "Dooce" is not an author function - it does not provide a description of a group of texts - rather, it is an arbitrary name assigned to one text that allows us to talk about it, yes, but that does not define it.
marie, i think you fail to realize that our politicized lives are "already" posted and edited. and the only reason that peter jennings has more "cred" is because he is a discursive production that stands in for the power structure that produced him. i find the media on television just as "profane" as the blog world. take the recent shooting at va tech or any the leading news stories, it's all fire and brimstone.
journalism is discursive, i do get that. but why make it more so by letting inexperienced people yap on about the world at large is a little more problematic than trusting someone like walter cronkite.
as for the author function thing, thanks for that explanation. i think that my point though, is the idea that the author function can exist outside of "literature." if we broke up a blog into six different books, all dealing with different thematic elements or topics within a blog, could we then assign an author function to this? does it only include fiction? I'm still trying to worry over the ins and outs of it, thanks for your help in clarifying.
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