Caitlin revved up the engine again (sorta) by protruding into the idea of team blogs and such.
The main difference between team blogs and single author blogs is, well, exactly that – the number of authors present in one blog. The keyword here is “present” or “presence”. In summation, team blogs act more as a space than an embodiment, an embodiment being an encapsulating representation of the single author blog. This isn’t to say that the multi-authorial nature of team blogs is a one-shot, no exceptions thing. There are finicky nuances, regions of plasticity where these hypotheses don’t apply; where representation is weighed down by one particular author or another, gravitated in densities by larger masses. Heterochromia is probably the best example of this, as even Randal, on the dasaku main site says that it’s “Sasa’s opus.” Does that entail it’s hers and only hers? No, as there are obviously other authors there, yet even I had some overbearing impression of her dominance there, be it biased by Randal and my own thoughts or otherwise.
Compare chrome.dasaku to Yukan. Yukan has the most authors I’ve ever seen (eleven or something) and so it’s not like there’s a single patriarch or matriarch watching guard over its beloved child (I wouldn’t exactly equate blissmo to Aunt Jemima[1]) Likewise, most, if not all Yukan authors have their own personal blogs which are referenced quite often, all contributing to the sense of Yukan as more a collective pool, the downtown carpool, if you will, as opposed to a centralized base of operations like Heterochromia seems to be (at least to me, and actually, that’s not a high percentage of Yukan authors with personal blogs…).
In my eyes Impz and Crusader seem to be THAT’s most prominent writers, either by intertextual referencing or quantity (quality, too) of updates alone. That doesn’t mean that THAT is Impz or Crusader. THAT is THAT: THAT is not subject to the gravitational representation of one or two authors. Yet that brings up how the representation of THAT may be, to an extent, constitutive of a core (to keep up with our ‘spaces’ terminology) group of authors, Impz and Crusader being part of that core, as Itsubun was at one point a writer for THAT (albeit being a “short lived” one). I think it just boils down to reputation (which is habitually furled around representation) which is a product of history.
Then what is the movement of representation like? Is THAT constitutive of Impz or Crusader, or is it the other way around? – are Impz and Crusader constitutive of the image – they represent (they are not represented) – of THAT? I don’t know, since I don’t think neither of them blog anywhere else. It’s different, however, when we claim to be “freelance” writers, or bloggers. Does the motion of freelancing (not really the politics of it) brings about the connoting powers of the author at hand? I don’t know, and I wouldn’t say so entirely. Would baka-raptor blogging on RandomC have the same representational affects as Owen blogging on anime|otaku?[2] No, since each have their own styles, digital personalities, etc.
So this brings up the naming of things and how it affects our perceptions. Is it IKnight, or is it Animanachronism? Which is the definitive name of that primary, blogging representation? One is the authorial pseudonym, the other, the title of the blog, yet both are “fictive” names that bear an iconic status amongst its readers. Likewise, people always, when rolling me, list me as “lelangiric”, yet never or rarely lelangir. Despite “lelangiric” being at the head of the blog, I never thought it to be the “title” of the blog. “”Lelangiric,” or so they say” was some elaborate, self-satiric pun of sorts, yet some blogs even used that entire phrase as their representation of my blog.[3]
Names seem to carry on, always carrying an original perception, original representative mentality, never to be dismantled. Newgeekphilosopher will always be such, likewise, itsubun will never be coffee spoons. In any case, insofar as coffee spoons is to double as both authorial pseudonym and blog title, I think the mentality of “itsubun” repositions itself wherever the authorial signified relocates. The newer coffee spoons signifier just conflicts with the ingrained mindset and thus we perceive it to be another weird blog title.
[1]
[2] That’s just asking for some trolling.
[3] Only one person had, seemingly, caught on that it was just an adjective.
14 Comments
Aunt Jeremiah is hot, lols
Anyway, regarding THAT, I think Impz and Crusader are kinda like representatives since they’re basically the only ones I know, besides Riex, but he also has his own blog. I’d like to think myself as a queen forcing the writers of Yukan to work, but I don’t. I let them write whenever about whatever — all they have to do is follow the same style though, regarding the images, etc.
I never say “my” blog, and always say “our”, or refer to it as Yukan. I just can’t seem to bring myself to say “my” lols. I do think the blog is like a gathering though, where bloggers just want to write here and help out, and I actually quite like it that they also have their own blog because having a team blog is difficult when too many posts appear in one day or something.
Also, Yukan gets to be on more blogrolls lols XD
We also need to improve on our team work, etc like holding conferences like Impz does for THAT, however, since it’s more of a “helping-out” or “wanting to write here because I like it but I also have my own blog” kinda thing, we probably don’t really need it besides just sending emails to each other, or me sending emails to them asking what anime they’d be blogging for Fall or something. But we all love each other (except 2cdb thinks we suck because he’s too shy to admit it), and that’s all that counts I think. As long as we can get along. And most of us are busy a lot, except me who seems to have enough spare time to draw comics :P
blissmo always struck me as more of a Mrs. Butterworth.
I’m also a victim of blog/blogger confusion. Back in the old days, I never referred to myself as Baka-Raptor, but everybody kept calling me Baka-Raptor, so I made the name official when I sold out.
Correction: I still go by itsubun as my handle. Coffee Spoons is the title of my blog.
I sometimes think of bloggers as [excuse the superficiality] “brand names”, in that they have attached to them certain expectations and standards that they have cultivated through their own writing styles and capabilities, their reputation as you have called it. So whether they maintain an individual blog or write for a team blog, that brand name follows them wherever they choose to publish their works and their usual readers can identify and filter them through recognition of said name.
Team blogs such as THAT recruit certain bloggers for the brand name that they bear because packaged with that name is also the readership and traffic that they will bring in. They’re like blogging commodities, able to be traded off and facilitated through the blogosphere =D And its a tried and true method that Impz has successfully executed judging by the amount of hits and comments THAT anime blog gets.
But putting traffic whoring aside, a team blog is also a more dynamic environment because there is more than one personality present and I’ve noticed that on team blogs, co-bloggers often comment on each others’ entries. Which makes for a nice and tight micro-community.
Personally, I think it’s a fair trade for the ups and downs of a team blog. Being in a team blog means having to share your representational space with others, taking away from your own air time and effect of presence. But in return the pressures and stress of blogging gets distributed so that one person doesn’t have to bear all of the burden of the blog.
I doubt a “freelance” blogger in the anime community would parallel with an actual freelance writer or journalist. Because while there have been and will be numerous collaborations and collaborative projects in the works, the individual bloggers still return to their own blogs afterwards to maintain and publish their own entries. So the actual perpetual homelessness of the “freelance” title does not apply to anime bloggers. What they formulate is more like a collaborative partnership that will be dismantled once the entry/project is finished. But this is still different from a team blog, because the team blog would then serve as the “home base” of the bloggers writing for it, therefore I don’t consider anyone on a team blog as a “freelance blogger”.
Guest bloggers probably come closest to the semantics of “freelance blogger” because they have no substantial association/ties with the blog that they would write for beforehand. But those are few and far apart.
‘Aunt Jeremiah is hot, lols’
AHAHAHAHAHA
Don’t laugh, Michael. When I saw Aunt Jeremiah I came buckets.
I think people (by which I suppose I include myself) read “lelangiric” as the title becase it’s in the title’s position: for us, it performs the function of a title. I’m sure there’s a whole new post somewhere there.
THAT seems to me to be more Crusader than Impz these days, probably simply because of posting frequency. Also Crusader has the gift of writing an episode summary that doesn’t read like an episode summary. Maybe Impz functions as some kind of synecdoche for THAT?
I’m sure Caitlin’s right about the rather self-absorbed nature of most single-author (monostylic?) blogs. While I struggle, not always successfully, against the temptation to write about myself, I’m always pushing myself (well, a persona) on my readers. My own blog title is itself a reference to me (well, a persona) – in its pomposity at least as Prufrockian as itsubun’s Coffee Spoons are/is.
I think that there is really a fine line to this question that you pose. If you ask that question, I will see THAT first, and everyone in THAT is under that umbrella of THAT (and how many THAT did I use in a single sentence).
“THAT seems to me to be more Crusader than Impz these days, probably simply because of posting frequency. Also Crusader has the gift of writing an episode summary that doesn’t read like an episode summary. Maybe Impz functions as some kind of synecdoche for THAT?” <– I have been slacking. Bite me.
The thing is that I am usually seen as the head of THAT due to the fact that I am one of the four original founders of the blog. The other three left after losing interest with anime or writing, so I am the only one left. I have never attempted to refer to myself since I think THAT allows a haven for any talented people to write, get some comments and understand a little bit more about the anime that they watch.
Oh ya, the good thing with THAT is that even when others leave the blog, it can still go on (not that I ever wish for any of them to move away). It’s the truth that people have their own aspirations, as you can note from the short lived presence of Riex and Itsubun.
Now, I need to find some other writers to disturb and poke for fun. *Grumbles* no summer anime that I like AT ALL T_T.
@lelangir:
I’ll remember your name, Daniel, if you remember my new one. And why did you link the same article of mine twice, there was plenty of other name-related shame posts you could have linked that I did in moments of despair…
blissmo: Aunt Jeremiah? Where’s this coming from? – unless you’re referring to a genderbent Orange-kun (the Mammy in the picture is Aunt Jemima). Aunt Jemima, if you’re not familiar with American memes (I don’t know if that constitutes a meme), is just a characteristic trait of fat, motherly black women; i.e. “I don’t want none of that Aunt Jemima shit in my women.” But in any case, she has immaculate teeth.
Well by enforcing a quasi-standardized blogging procedure (if only for images) that’s inevitably setting up a Yukanian norm, I guess that also reinforces a general Yukan image. I completely forgot to mention the effect that dasaku and animeblogger have, as they’re just hosting sites, yet each member of the host carries a bit of the image of it with them. If, say, the host server had a blog, that would turn out to be a hierarchical tree of authors: host > member blogs > team blog authors.
BK: That’s kind of like what Jacob is doing now, sorta, going by his blog title instead of a “historical” handle.
itsubun: Yeah, that’s true, but since your previous blog’s title was the same as the handle, I was under the assumption that your new blog had the same analogous effect – that your new blog’s title was also your new handle (although remembering back from your wordpress one, the title was “itsubun anime blog”).
Haha, blogging reputation as commodities, that’s good (if we take comments as money, then there is some kind of economy to it all, I guess =p)!
I like the micro-community aspect. However, I remember on that lolikit vs. Owen flame post a while back one random person said how blogging was for bloggers only, and that the lurking community was shrinking. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing; well, I don’t even know if values of good/bad are to be imbued upon that matter. It just seems like the entire communalistic aspect of the blogosphere has changed, is changing, and will see change in the future.
The burden of the blog eh? That’s true, sometimes I feel like I have to post, which isn’t a great thing (seeing as though it doesn’t really produce great pieces). I guess if I ever go on hiatus, or Randal disowns me from dasaku or something I’d try and join a team blog or regress to the depths of wordpress again, though as long as I don’t care about traffic (fat chance…) it doesn’t matter. The burden, as you’ve said, is the self-fulfilling status-quo each blogger has set up and enforced unto theirselves. Selling out, perhaps, may be inherently latent within the single author blog….no, on second thought, it isn’t. I don’t really know what qualifies as “selling out” anyway (probably because I’m such a conformist sell-out that I can’t tell!)
If nomadic, freelance blogging were to become an aniblogosphere trend, that would be pretty interesting. I think that would generate a lot more traffic, seeing as though prevalent readers would have to search “local clusters” within the greater galactic regions of the universal sphere. I can’t really conceive how that would work anyhow, with user registration and the limits of technology. If a freelance blogger decides to write one post for one blog, that person will have to, by necessity of wordpress interface, become a member of that blog, and thus their nomadic status dissipates. Unless, however, the owner of the blog just directly says the article is by a certain person, or wordpress x.y succumbs to these futuristic potentials.
On that note, I don’t think I’m really familiar with guest blogging, but even your waffle spoons feature is different because it’s just posting a conversation with another blogger – it’s not like Riex directly enters the representation space of coffee spoons. Yet, to an extent, Riex, by having his words directly posted on your site, does connote and contribute to the overall image and reputation of coffee spoons as that much more Riexian.
Mike: You know you’ve failed when blissmo’s comment is more insightful than your own.
IK: The function of the title position is an interesting thing. I wrote a paper for a class about how pictures on our university’s website functioned as propaganda, and typeface and aesthetic positioning played a big part.
I have a bad habit of not reading episodic summaries if I’m not watching the anime nor have ever seen it. Thus if my reader holds 40 or so new entries usually 3-5 get read, as Impz can attest that this summer season is particularly flavorless in comparison to spring. I don’t necessarily think I try and directly write about myself, and introspective pieces are rare, yet, as you said, “forcing” a persona onto readers is inevitable and an inextricable part of reading. That reminds me of the advent of the book (or pre-mass archival) when only scholars or clerics who knew Latin could read the bible to serfs, peasants, etc. Being read to, that is having a work being interpreted through a proxy instead of directly, sets up a whole slew of hegemonic procedures that can obscure truth and history. Following vector-reading as hegemony comes archiving – library wars (if you will) – as a way to hold power over people.
Impz: There is a very fine line, in fact this can go back, somewhat, to the chicken & the egg question by asking “which came first: the representation of THAT, or the representational powers of its authors?” Obviously the image of THAT didn’t exist before it was created, but this thin line we’re observing are the “finicky nuances, regions of plasticity where these hypotheses don’t apply; where representation is weighed down by one particular author or another, gravitated in densities by larger masses”.
The “fatherly” presence you hold probably does, in large part, add on to your image as THAT (or vice versa; THAT as Impz).
Asperger’s Anime Blog/Jacob Marin If you ever have a change to watch Infinite Ryvius, you’ll notice how the past plays a part, sort of, in defining characters. That goes without saying that you can’t erase the past, in a Kaiban sense – that memories and history are integral parts of self-development and to shirk off history, stories, and the past (regardless of how mistaken they are) does no justice to that very past, nor does justice to the mindset of the present-self – the self that conveniently shirks off the past.
In reference to your most recent post, if you don’t want people to remember you by your previous handle, just don’t ever mention it, and it will go away, that is, don’t write it.
(lengthiest comment evar)
I still don’t know what made you dislike wordpress.com so much. Will I ever know? :3
And when I hear “freelance blogger” based on first impressions after reading this post, I think of a blogger that actually doesn’t have their own blog, and just goes on whatever blog he/she feels like to post on, “for the right price”. Though that might be more of a “mercenary blogger” more than anything else.
I really don’t think of Drastic My Anime Blog (henceforth DMAB here) as a team blog, so I was kinda surprised when people nominated it as such during the Anime Blog Awards. But it does make sense, since there is more than one author (and maybe more than two, depending on how the future goes) on the blog, and we do comment on each others posts, take some joking potshots at each other every once in a while, and stuff like that. At the same time, I don’t refer to DMAB as just “my” blog either, though I create it and maintain it. Since it isn’t really just “mine” anymore, or something like that. :P
BigN: I’m not a very resolute person, especially when it comes to aesthetics. I can see how running something as large as wordpress takes money, although I’ll never like how money is required (although an acute amount…) to be able to customize CSS (you’re stuck with the provided themes otherwise – a trite affair for some, a wholly annoying thing for others).
The “right price” – well, that could entail some kind of blogging commodity as itsubun pointed out. There isn’t necessarily a monetary economy incorporated into the aniblogosphere (I hope there never will be), but traffic, I’d say, is the #1 motivation for any kind of “advertising” excursion. Traffic, however, is only second to the primary goal of (I guess that makes it #2) reaching the audience, trying to convey your thoughts and be heard, etc.
I was also kind of skeptical at calling a binary author blog a team blog – “team” sort of sounds like several people, maybe three or more. Perhaps duo blog would be a preferable choice in semantics, but I can’t say for sure if there’s much representational difference between the word and meaning that “team blog” carries with it as “duo blog” does – or does it?
I was linked, but no mention was made of it: I call myself 21stcenturydigitalboy but my blog is called Euphoric Field. Incidentally, it used to be called ‘Digital Boy’s Anime Bloggin’ until January however the site had no nameplate on it’s header and nobody read it. Now it’s Euphoric Field, but, in fact, the header reads ‘Euphoric Field ~MOERU~’ the bottom line is just that I’ve never been fond of sticking to one name for too long, and really, it only gets more confusing from there – my MYAL account is ‘2008digitalboy’ and I’m singned up for some forums as ‘Deus ex digital boy’ and others as ‘digitalboyDB’. At leas the digiboy ties them all togehter, however it was really weird when people on Anime-planet were calling me ‘deus’ and not realizing it wasn’t the central focus of my name.
digitalboy: I read somewhere, randomly, that digital identities (no pun intended?) are based on discontinuities, thus, digital “identity” is not so much attached to the name as it is the content or whatever the person behind the handle/name does or says.
The central part of the name is interesting, as you put it, because the “central part” of the handle is your own focus – the “deus ex” is the prefix, the “digital boy” is the stem. What defines the suffix, prefix or stem is, again, history and reputation. If your original handle is simply “digital boy” then, consequently, any addition to the genesis can be viewed as pre or suffixtural (that isn’t a word). The stem becomes the stem insofar as its history and reputation carry and uphold its personal meaning both to you and its audience.
Either that or convenience. Deus = 4 letters, digital boy is a lot more.
lelangir:
I really wanted to comment properly back there, but I just laughed. And laughed. And laughed. And laughed.
I don’t have a lengthy comment, but I believe team blogs are like small countries. Most of the people in the small countries count, most of them help oil the machinery of the state, but only a few are truly visible, like the president or prime minister. With regard to single blogs, I try to make it as personal as possible so I probably won’t work well with a teammate.
Besides, I’ve yet to find someone who writes like me, and you’ve also to find that person. The same can be said about Daniel.
Just my two cents, btw.
Mike: Oh ok, that’s ok, I’m glad it was funny (I can never tell with you Brits and Brit-wannabe’s [just kidding]).
Countries eh? That’s an interesting analogy, but I always figure that if I’m to use an analogy I should abide by its larger notions – i.e. insofar as countries (the political entity, nations aren’t as political) are a congruent analogy, then so too should its constituent states, cities, towns and counties be. Anyway, yeah, I guess every kind of representation system has its “figure head” of sorts, and team blogs aren’t an exception.
Recently I came upon [another] Kitsune whose blog is dissimilar to mine yet comments in a similar way. Also, recently again, The Moral Anti-Realist comes off as a blog that holds more similar qualities than dissimilar (although I’m not versed in philosophy, and I have to lurk through his archives soon). Besides that, Pontifus always comes off as slightly familiar when reading.