A sub-version of writing and of citizenship : the blog’s auto-writing and the hybrilog as trans-writing

Abstract

(Excerto) We all know that a blog is a diary diffused in the Internet. However, sometimes we may understand a blog as a type of biography of the blog’s author. This is somewhat far from reality. The blog segregates essentially an auto-writing, which is not necessarily a biographical writing. Its differences are based at least on the following three criterions: First criterion: the protagonist of the events narrated. The hero of the biography is an individual, that coincides with its author in the case of an auto-biography. On the contrary, the main character of the blog is the global world. The blogger doesn't necessarily speak about himself, although he/she does so often indirectly, when he is speaking about others. But the main target of the blog’s gossip are external events to its author. In other words, in the biography there is an author that tells a story or traces an History of a social actor. In the auto-biography, an author coincides with the actor of the events. And in the case of the blog, the author talks about several actors, one of them being himself. Second criterion: the time of the events reported. The biography presupposes a past story, that is recounted in the moment of its writing, be it in the form of a biography or as an autobiography. In a blog, we observe a mode of writing on events usually not occurred in the past, but happened and presented in the present. Third criterion: The ‘opination’ degree. ‘Opination’ may be understood as the process of opining or emitting an opinion about an event or on a subject in discussion inside a specific conjuncture of a society or community’s life. In the biography, the faithful report of the events prevails in regard to the judgement that can be done on these events, although a judgement is always present in a biography’s writing, less or more visibly. On its side, the blog privileges the opinion, and the event is mainly a pretext for the emission of an opinion. In cyberspace, this cyberopinion is constructing a new sub-version of citizenship. Thus, a blog builds an hybrid style, situated somewhere between the biography and the journalism. It is, therefore, a style of auto-writing about the life of the others. Or an autorepresentative writing on the contemporary life. Or a common diary scribbled by our global world. Viviane Serfaty (2004), inside the articulation among the literary criticism, the psychoanalysis and the social sciences, delineates the historical roots of this auto-representative writing in the USA, compared to the developments of the auto-writing in the Internet. The blogger’s motivations of his writing are influencing irreversibly the American society and culture. This author deals with themes like the humor in cyberspace, the dichotomy private/public and the ciber-bodyness. One of the more original and controversial digital diaries, according to Maxim Jakubowski (2005), is the set of testimonies about the sexuality of the bloggers, for example prostitutes, strippers and webcam girls.