Timing is everything.
Such a cliché at times, and in others that reminder seems to sum it all up. I feel it is the latter when evaluating blogging as a social action and media revolution. There was a sort of synergy created between the social movement of the blog and the kairos, or timing, in which the blog gained its popularity. There could not have been one without the other, so it is my understanding that the kairos created throughout the 1990’s and that continues through today helped to foster the creation and development of the blogging phenomenon as we know it. The blog has become so multi-faceted that with this social movement comes the idea of redefining the genre- perhaps instead of just one, the blog has become more of a medium that fosters multiple genres and subgenres.
Kairos, as I first encountered it, was a concept that Bitzer referred to in the timing of his rhetorical situation. There had to be an element of a “fitting” or timely response in order for the exigence to carry any significance with the audience it was intended for. The effectiveness of an argument is a time sensitive matter, and the rhetorical situation was no exception to this. Kairos is the idea of maintaining this dual relationship that incorporates “both the sense in which discourse is understood as fitting and timely [and] in which it can seize on the unique opportunity of a fleeting moment to create new rhetorical possibility (Miller/Shepherd,2). This “cultural moment” Miller and Shepherd describe as the catalyst that launched the beginning of the blog, can be traced through the pop culture events of the 1990’s. It was during this decade that the social constructs that defined and created communication, both public and private, began to be blurred. This need for media voyeurism and media exhibitionism combined with the growing accessibility to computers and the internet no longer limited the public sphere to what information they could gain access to. With these roles being blurred, the kairos to foster a medium in which the private can be made public, like the blog, had been created. American culture had become dependent on this “need to know” and with the new technology of the internet to enable such a need; I find that this is where the timely response of the blog as a social action comes into play. I don’t know if I agree that it was specific incidents throughout the decade that perpetuated this kairos for the blog. Instead, I see them in a larder scope, in the “bigger picture” as more of a shift in paradigm. The way we received and perceived information had been changed because of this series of events, but not so drastically changed by one more than another. It truly became a timely response to the cultural shift which “unsettled boundaries between public and private and new technology” (Miller/Shepherd, 10).
Now that the kairos had been utilized to its fullest potential, creating a new and developing medium of communication in which the lines between private and public had been skewed, it is only accurate that the definition of the genre and the blog as a genre would need to change as well. There cannot be two contradicting ideals held to the same social action, and as a result, while one changes, so must the other. The genre as I had to come to understand it was as a classification tool; in giving certain characteristics and stereotypes to one thing, it could distinguish and categorize it as something when compared to something else. The genre became a set of constructs and limitations given as guidelines to separate and organize the vast variety of publishing mediums found today; similar to Berkenkotter and Huckin belief that “genres are the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed (Miller/Shepherd, 1). Yet with any kind of classification, I take issue with limiting one medium to a certain “genre” which may in fact have elements of more than one. Why would you want to define something with such a narrow view as to limit what it could be? “Genres change, evolve and decay” according to Miller and Shepherd, and as such it seems arbitrary to continue to define genre by such rigid ideologies. Instead, there should be fluidity to the definition and when evaluated in relationship to kairos, genre has changed significantly.
By the standard and established definition of genre, there is no doubt that the blog is functioning in that manner, with similar elements of context, formatting and audience. It is understood that this combination of continuity are what help to create the “scaffolds” Miller and Shepherd refer to. But with other kinds of literary genres, it is easy to identify a series of requirements in order for it to be considered one genre over another; they must have these characters, with these literary elements, and adhere to these formatting arrangements. But with fourteen content-focused categories recognized by the Weblog Review, and another five by the Wikipedia, the blog is not able to fit as nicely into this mold the definition of genre has provided. Rettburg describes the blog as “far more diverse in their subject matter” (Rettburg, 19) than to its easily identifiable formatting. In the comparison between Dooce, Kottke and Daily Kos, elements such as the post itself, time stamps, the blog roll appearing in chronological order, etc. are found in many of the layouts and become the overlying requirements that help define what a blog is. But if based solely on these elements alone, is it entirely accurate to contain the blog as a genre if only its formatting is considered? Or would it be more accurate to evaluate the blog as a series of genres and subgenres, lending it to be considered more of a social medium? I would have to agree with Rettburg and the latter. To consider the blog as just one genre, the material limitations given to what that might be create too many crossovers and exceptions for it to be contained to just one genre. To be seen as a medium offers the blog more room for variance in content and style, within given constraints and limitations for each. I believe that the blog is “meeting different exigencies for different rhetors” (Miller/Shepherd, 6) and in doing so, the blog as a social action continues to change and evolve to fit the needs and demands of the public. While in the beginning the blog might have been contained to the limiting “scaffolds” of a single genre, I feel this medium has outgrown that definition and has become something much greater; a new umbrella medium that has begun to foster multiple facets of communication and publication genres and subgenres that fall underneath it.
With time comes change, and with change comes new theories and phenomenons. This holds true in acknowledging where and when the blog originated in comparison to what it has grown to be today. The kairos that established this cultural revolution continues today, not as a single moment of the past, but as a collection of events and ideological shifts. As the lines between the public and private are continued to be redefined and skewed, so must our views on how to we rhetorically understand the blog. Our previous definitions and constraints given to the genre as a classification tool, fall short in helping to categorize the blog as a single thing. Instead, it has grown to encompass so many textual topics and styles of writing, that the blog as a new technology must be evaluated under a new and growing definition of genre- perhaps as a medium of many genres.
