Fame or Famine

The Joys of Being a Rube, er, that is, Blogger

by Gray on November 12th, 2007

At the Blogworld expo the panel I spoke on dealt with ethics (as opposed to the panel next door, on blogging 101, where they apparently didn’t need ethics). One of the concerns had to do with credentials - the fact that typical journalists have the press credentials of a paper to back them up, whereas bloggers are any old schmuck with access to a computer and the ability to string words together in something approximating a sentence.

But there’s a freedom to that, and a freshness that can overcome the misspellings and such. Moreover, in the arts you are able to get a diversity of views and perspectives, even if they do come from the “rubes” as Apollinaire mentions in a recent Arts Journal article:

“We [as critics] tend to say what a dance means or say what it does, but we don’t always put the two together. We too rarely offer the kind of macro view that would give readers some idea of how you go from steps to meaning in dance… But even when a writer does see the whole picture, she needs space–a bigger word count–to get to it, and that very few of us have. Which is why blogging is nice. If only it paid.”

Personally, I think the most incredible effect of blogging is the voice it gives the performers themselves, be they Sally Potter or Swan Lake Samba Girl. I cherish the glimpses behind the talents that shape our arts. It will enrich this period of our culture more than I think any of us suspect.

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POSTED IN: General: Peforming Arts