Blogging Thoughts

Hello all, my name is Steen Christiansen and Stuart kindly invited me to contribute to this blog, which I am grateful for. My primary interest is in the way culture and aesthetics intersect and influence each other, and this will probably the subject of most of my posts. Here, however, I will briefly sketch a view of blogging.

The blogging medium is a difficult beast to get a handle on, as it feels more transient than more traditional media such as journals, papers or magazines. Its cultural status is also lower than a journal, since it requires very little to initiate a blog.

However, a blog has something which no journal can ever have: immediate reader feedback, for better and worse. While one can submit responses to articles and opinions, it will inevitably take longer than posting a comment on a blog, and equally longer for further responses from the original author. This is where the blog really shines, and is also the best indicator of a blog's successful status. High-profile community blogs such as Long Sunday have a very engaged reader/writer relation and often the boundaries between reader and writer are blurred - prolific commentators may be as significant as official contributors.

A successful blog differs from a journal in the way that it needs more than just readers - it needs active readers who will participate and extend the posts that come from regular writers. In this way, a blog becomes more like a forum for further ideas to develop; by blogging one's thoughts, one gains the opportunity for others to reflect on them. I hope this will happen here.