Anny Ballardini's Blogging as the Sharing of Knowledge

"For poetry, and for the written word in general, the internet--of which blogging is one of the most astounding events--becomes the product of the second greatest revolution after the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg.

Together with Greg Ruggiero of the Immediast Underground, we are experimenting a distinction between public and audience. “An audience is passive; a public is participatory."

[ . . . ]

In Introduction: Communication I connected my topic to the material we had to read during the course. I tried, thanks to the directives received by our Professor during the various assignments, to connect Poetry Blogs to the critical studies by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Ted Nelson, George P. Landow, Richard Rorty, James O’ Donnell, to the two novels by William Gibson: “The Neuromancer” and “Pattern Recognition”, to the evolution of writing or the history of textuality with its apogee in 1450 with Johann Gutenberg’s movable type and the printing press, to hypertexts linked to the work of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, to the idea of “cyberspace” with its many e-zines, hypertexts in general (see Eastgate Systems Reading Room for fiction), and finally ubuweb.com used as a reference mainly for the creative and critical work by Kenneth Goldsmith, Brian Kim Stefans, Christian Bök, Charles Bernstein, David Daniels, Darren Wershler-Henry, Neil Hennessy, and Loss Pequeňo Glazier’s work.

[ . . . ]

A transmutation takes place at many levels. The same fact that we are not writing with a pencil or with a pen on a piece of paper but typing directly on a screen, be it on a word document or directly inside the box that will bring our words onto our blog, has to be taken in consideration. I remember years ago writing that poetry is the poorest art, it does not require brushes and expensive colors, canvases, or instruments like music, a piece of paper and a pencil can do. We are now dealing with very expensive equipments, a broadband connection, sophisticated softwares, the best anti-viruses, backup memories. Who are the poets now? What time is left to the observation so dear to Goethe in his “Theory of colors” or to Leonardo in his “Notes”? Our time filled in with acronyms: URL, URI, WAP (Wireless Protocol Applications), PDA (Personal Digital Assistants), IPP (Internet Printing Protocol), IP addresses, ISP (Internet Service Provider or IAP, Internet Access Provider) to connect through: ADSL, ISDN or Broadband wireless connections, . . .

[ . . . ]

The negative side is easily depicted by the amount of hours spent in front of a screen in a sitting posture. Many people could point out the lack of quality of numerous sites, and therefore again uncountable void hours spent in trying to find interesting material, or in the present contexts, blogs worth reading and following. It is anyhow quite easy to invalidate such an opinion since Poetry Mailing Lists have recently flourished with some highly respectable correspondents who send in their chosen links; or blogs with their blogrolls (links to blogs or sites selected by the Author) are unending. There is a new society out there, people lead you to “good stuff” to read, they recommend you check the new issue of an online magazine, they even point out which Poets you should read first.

Still reading . . .