Extension of man, man!

Now if I can pick up where I left off a few posts ago...

Ah yes, that's it. I was talking about how blogs differ from person to person, and the fact that they can be designed in a variety of ways, which ultimately reflects the blog creator's personality and taste. I found some useful information about the theory behind this seemingly simple idea.

Many bloggers consider their posts to be an extension or representation of themselves (Boyd, 2006). Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is an extension of man” (Federman, 2004) applies here, as the Internet allows people to create an extension of themselves via a relatively new medium. With ready access and availability around the world, the task of making an ‘extension of themselves’ is also relatively easy. It has even been argued that “the community resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing” (Trevino, 2005).

Each blogger has the capacity to develop a distinct style; one that emerges from the creativity of the producer and reflects their personal character (Edmonds, 2005). Williams and Jacobs assert that rather than “alienate a readership by exposing one's personal traits and idiosyncrasies, it adds to the very popularity of blogs, as ‘exhibitionistic behavior is encouraged, supported, and even sought’ by the ‘cyber-voyageurs’ of this theater” (William and Jacobs, 2004). Further, blogs facilitate feedback from peers, supporting knowledge building; and help form new contextualizations in learning through the immediate sharing of other materials through hyperlinks (Williams and Jacobs, 2004).

This notion can be directly linked to Mortensen and Walker's excerpt on how blogs are like roots and fragments reaching out for each other. Once one idea has been published on the Internet, someone somewhere will read it, and either comment on it, or begin a discussion from it. Even a small comment has the potential to snowball into a related topic to the body of what was being commented on, or to build on what was already said. I found McLuhan's idea of blogs as an "extension of man" to be an excellent analogy for the behaviour associated with blogs, as blogs are, to a certain extent, digital representations of oneself. The topics someone writes about, the ideas, the tone and even the design of a blog is all that people have access to when surfing the web. Through this, opinions and thoughts are disseminated in the enormous span that is the Internet, which leads to communities of thought and ideas.

Ah, that was a big paragraph. I also like to think of blogs as a disguise of some sort; although blogs are personalised, they aren't always representative of the person writing it. Anyone can pretend to be someone else on the Internet, which poses a huge range of problems. I'll cover this in a later post...

For now, I am going to give my wrists and fingers a rest from all this typing!