I'm Jill Walker Rettberg, author and professor of Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. I co-direct the Center for Digital Narrative, a 10-year Norwegian Centre of Research Excellence, and I lead the ERC project Machine Vision in Everyday Life. This site started as my blog in October 2000.
Rorschach
From how I read the original article, the author is comparing the reading of any material to the renting of space. As it is read, you place your own mark on it and it becomes yours, just as you decorate an apartment or house with little bits of yourself. My interpretation is that as something is read you can’t help but put your own bias/spin/life experience on it. Or, everyone sees everything a little differently.
If I understand the way you see it, blogs take that a step further and instead of being an individual experience the reading/interpreting becomes a community (co-op? hostel?) experience.
And the comments would be like a house guest who brings a housewarming gift? They visit your home and leave a little bit of themselves that other people who visit can see. It’s still your house but now there’s a bit from someone else in it as well; not prominently displayed but there if you take the time to look.
Not Me
More like commenters are having a picnic in your (unfenced) garden, no?
Jill
Mm, Tom Matrullo wrote about blogs as loci amoeni a year or so ago. Loci amoeni are enclosed Renaissance gardens to which romance heroes would retreat after slaying dragons and such. More or less. Tom suggests that blogs are a site of play, not gaming play exactly:
I like toying with metaphors for blogging, though I suppose that toying mightn’t really lead anywhere useful. Metaphors tend to create as many misunderstandings as understandings.
Not Me
So, it seems, do theories. Perhaps toying, rather than playing or metaphor, is the key word.
Jill
Oh, but I wouldn’t go without the understandings. Would you? Of course if you’re not yourself you’d not actually know, would you.