Blogs as Art?
Recently, Longreads published a piece exploring the place of the blog in the literary space. Thirty years has passed since the first blog appeared. The piece’s author, Megan Marz, seems to to argue that the blog, while garnering attention when it was new and novel, has not earned the acclaim or serious consideration it deserves. People still prefer books, and Robert Silvers, a founding editor of The New York Review of Books lamented, in 2013, that there was “no critical perspective being brought to bear” on blogs.
Nothing in the lit world is legitimized apart from the book, the piece notes (complains?) Pardon my sarcasm, but Congratulations, now you’re getting a picture of the literary industry. Maybe there’s a good reason that blogs weren’t legitimized: they were owned by their authors and already published. How could the mainstream book industry capitalize on them?
Justin Gould and Emily Hall were two prolific early bloggers who gained followings.
Gould and Hall felt deeply about what they were doing. They commanded large audiences and appeared in mainstream media, becoming national avatars for a new kind of writing. They also repeatedly referenced literary influences. But journalists categorized their efforts as sociocultural rather than aesthetic phenomena. This would happen again and again to writers who tried new things on the internet. Always a curiosity…
