Blogging Metaphors

Yesterday, I met Elvis. He was very much alive and kicking. His black hair glistened as he stretched his lean and lanky body in the ruby red sofa. His voice was clear and so was the message: pet me more! Elvis is an American European Shorthair. A cat. He’s kept Ingrid Rudefors company for more than 16 years!

Ingrid and I talked about blogging. We discussed the best way of explaining to someone inexperienced with the concept. Ingrid came up with the idea of describing it as a combination of a diary and the book “My friends”. This book was a must when we were kids and contained, when properly filled in, information about yourself and your friends such as your favourite film star, what kind of clothes you preferred and what you wanted to be when you grew up. I wonder if it’s still around?

We also compared blogging to chronicles in papers and magazines. In contrast to the diary metaphor, it does not require you to be all that personal but instead it puts more demand on your writing to be funny or clever or both. When you keep a diary, you are really more using writing as form of therapy and do not expect anyone to read your text. A chronicle or a column, however, is written with a specific target group in mind.

The chronicle and diary metaphors share an underlying metaphor, namely that of one-way communication through text. A totally different way of describing blogging would be to characterise it as a kind of dialogue where you allow or even encourage your readers to interact with you in a rather informal and spontaneous way. So far I haven’t allowed comments on my blog, why I have yet to explore the dialogue metaphor in practice.

The topic of blogging metaphors has, of course, already been discussed on the web. For example in a blog by Liz Strauss. Billboard, cocktail party, smorgasbord, conga… I must look into this properly!