Copy This, Lessig!
I've been paying attention to Lessig lately. His ideas are not what I entirely agree with, but they interest me all the same.

There is one point made in his book Free Culture that really pisses me off. What he says is true. But the fact that it's true really pisses me off. Lessig says that on the internet, everything is a copy. Everything is a copy of something that exists in a non-digitized format. Any digitized song is a copy of a song that exists on a CD. Any book that is placed on the internet is a copy of that book.

Let's reverse-engineer this idea for a second and think about it this way: Is my blog, my written words apart from any programming or hypertext coding that I may put up on this page, is my blog simply a copy of what would be on the page? Is that how the law sees what I'm doing?

Maybe that's not what Lessig or the law is saying. Maybe it is. That is, however, what I'm hearing and it is really pissing me off.

How stifling is that? According to this, cartoons like Homestar Runner are digitized copies of something that could be shown on TV. Is it true? I don't think so. While Homestar could translate easily into a movie or some kind of other medium, when they make a Strong Bad email every Monday with interactive links and jumps and place actual pop-ups into their animation, they are creating for the internet using a medium known as Flash Animation. True, flash animation has been shown on television and in other media, but it was created for and reaches its full potential here on the internet. Homestar Runner belongs to the internet. So does "All Your Base". So does the blog.

Blogging is writing. At the same time, blogging is not writing. Blogging is a new way of writing. Homestar Runner is animation, but it is not TV animation. It is internet animation. Blogging is internet writing. It is a different world known as the "Blogosphere". It is interactive writing, you could say. It carries a different set of attributes.

One of the first things about blogging (or personal publishing might make this easier to understand) is that all writing is placed on the same level. Personal publishing does not care. There is no "personal publisher" other than the writer himself. Every single tidbit, every article, limerick or stilted opinion piece all carry the same weight. Everything goes in, no matter the quality. You can be the quirkiest writer and do the weirdest little real-time interjections and go off on the longest tangents and do things that no print publication would ever touch. Somebody will read it and love it. More than one somebody, probably. This, believe it or not, is not the deepest schism that disconnects internet writing from print.

The deepest schism between writing and personal publishing is interactivity. You have a great amount of power over how comments are made in your comments section. Some bloggers care nothing of feedback. "Private" has been a function of blogs going all the way back to before they were called "blogs". LJ has some pretty nuanced controls for their comments. All the same, the comment feature lets people know they cared enough to click on your blog. It lets you know you were read. That can all happen automatically. It happens very often that you will have a long discussion (read: argument) over your words. This all happens in real time. There are upsides and downsides to this form and this is not to say there is never any feedback on print articles at all. This is just to note a difference. Everything happens as soon as the article is read. And often you will get a reply back from the blogger (if he has comments or if he cares to give any comments back, you might not get that on atrios.) The internet is sometimes the worst place to have a discussion, but better than not having one at all.

A point related to the one above is that sometimes a blog is good for saying "I'm not going to be posting today." Or "Can you help me find this piece of information?" Or "I'm really bummed out. Can you give me any words of advice?" These are thing that out of simply being seen as a waste of space for the average print publication does not ever see print. These are sometimes the best posts I've ever read. Posting my responses to them are some of the best things I've done in my days of bloging.

Another slight difference in blogging is the automatic access of information. Columnists can't trust that half the people will have read/will read the article they reference to get the whole story (Ann Coulter trusts that you wont.) But in a blog, you simply link and there it is. Which brings me to a related point. A hyperlink and other forms of Hyper Text Markup Language have no real translation into print. Have you ever printed out a page of links? How much good did that do you? Yet, this is a standard of the internet writing world. You can post as many little references at the bottom of the page as you can, that does not matter. Part of it is also seeing what they link and how.

Finally, this is probably one of my longest blog posts. This is an article that I might like to see print in a regular publication. But, alas, I write for the internet. When you blog, you tend to write in short paragraphs. You make little personal dispatches. You quickly say what you want to say and then stop. You make it as long or as short as you need it to be, but most blog entries are short. I can't tell you exactly what the breakdown is on how long is the average blog post, but I'd love to see the research. I've never seen one that would qualify as a "chapter". It's a real chicken and the egg story, really. Do we blog in shorthand? Or does a place of instantaneous writing make this a place where we all scribble it down as fast as we can and leave? Is it both? I don't know if this is a problem really. One of the best blog posts I've ever seen said simply "save me". Brevity is simply an attribute of writing/blogging, not a problem or a blessing.

This is for the internet. This is for the blog. This is for myself. This is so everyone (with access) can read. This is not a copy. This is the original.