Tom Coates of Plasticbag.com has posted an article about weblogs as mass amateurisation. I’m not terribly interested in that, but love the nitty gritty of his comparison of the homepage to the weblog, midway in section four, near the end of the article. While the homepage is imagined as a place, he writes, the weblog articulates a voice. Even better:
In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us – through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear.
Francois Lachance
interesting set of assumptions:
1) homepages never shift
2) that one can “wear” voices
I’m not sure the opposition works. Doesn’t the medium of the screen offer a place from which to project (and experiment with the projection of) voice? I do think the analogy has some value if persued in terms of rhythym and breath as element of reception (and not production). Blog or static home page depending on the amount of scrolling one might have to do can engage different amounts of readerly energy. A long call and response in a comment section to an entry to a blog may require some sustained attention to breath control on the part of the reader and likewise a home page can offer a scroll-a-rama either vertically and/or horizontally.
(pause)
Thanks you have me thining about breath both for the writing/production/image collage and for the reception.
(exhale)
xox