blogging, about blogging

I have been asked to be a guest blogger for or-bits.com, which is a terrific project curated by Marialaura Ghidini consisting of online group shows of works made specifically for presentation on the web, many specifically for the site, organized around broad and imaginatively interpreted themes.   

The latest edition is Acceleration.

My contributions will be a series of posts speculating around a number of ideas that have been percolating recently, prompted by the reemergence of ideas around digital materialism, extrapolating about and beyond media specificity, its contemporary resonances and implications. These have developed out of the convergence of a number of recent factors, which I won’t detail here for fear of spoiling the posts, but has been prompted in this context by the presence of work by Rosa Menkman on or-bits.com.  Menkman has over the past few years revived ideas around glitch.  My first post, posted today, is Accelerating accidents.

The serial nature of my posts on or-bits.com will probably distinguish them from posts here on my ‘regular’ blog, which have tended to be one-off topics - pursuing and developing ideas and themes over a number of posts is something I’ve never really done. In fact my blogging activity here has become rather sparodic lately, probably because this sort of activity has been taken over by 'micro-blogging' habits, specifically in my case via status updates and posting links on Facebook (and less so Twitter), which directly reaches peers and friends - like a form of soft 'push publishing', rather than the 'pull publishing' of regular blogging - and as such possibly reaches a larger and more regular readership. It also changes the nature of what’s ‘published’ as it’s a much more casual, immediate, spontaneous and sometimes personal form, one-liners both flippant and serious on any number of different types of topics, conversations in comments boxes, links to things that I happen to be interested in and think that others may (or not) find interesting, which in themselves become catalysts for comment and conversation, and so on.

As such this ‘return’ to blogging, at or-bits.com is an interesting prospect for me and, as evinced here, has also led to another ‘return’ to blogging, about blogging.