Wednesday, November 24, 2004

lost in translation

Hmm..... So a friend of mine took a look at my first post and said, "congratulations, you've released your bitterness into cyberspace". Now, maybe it's just semantics but I don't think I'm bitter; it's more like a dry, sardonic, self-deprecating wit (in my humble opinion). It just seems bitter because it's extremely difficult to convey tone, inflection and nuance on a blog unless you are a superior writer- and Joyce I'm not. But neither are the majority of people writing in this ever-metastasizing blogsphere.

I'm not being an asshole here, it really is more difficult to blog tone than to express it through hard copy written word. Writing, as opposed to blogging, tends to exist in terms of some larger context i.e. a magazine, newspaper, or novel. Even if the inflection doesn't jump off the page, the reader can usually glean meaning from the context. You could find a different meaning from the same sentence depending on whether you read it in Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Economist or The Enquirer.

Blogging is different because the text seems to appear from nowhere and in context of nothing; it's like little puffs of words that exist in a void. Given that blogging is becoming a wildly popular medium for expression, I wonder if there will be an evolution in the way nuance is communicated. Maybe some sort of technical way to say "haha, just kidding" or some grammatical equivalent to that stupid winking face that people make using punctuation.
Or not ;)

In the interest of full disclosure: I'm not a writer and I don't play one on TV. I'm also a blogging neophyte, but I've been devouring other people's blogs for about a year and this is something I've been thinking about. I'd love to hear other opinions, unless it's people saying that I'm an idiot. Those people can go fuck themselves (I like to try and work the word fuck into each post at least once).

Or maybe, like my friend said, I’m just fucking bitter….



Posted by LMM14_1 :: 4:37 AM :: 0 Comments:

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