XplanaZine

Jesse Wilbur has an interesting post about the value of voice in online content. And, while Wilbur is referring specifically to the contract between singular voices of blogs and the communal voice (with no real identity) or projects like Wikipedia, I couldn’t help but hearken back to an earlier period of my life when I was fascinated by the different kinds of narrative voices in fiction.In particular, I have always been fascinated by literature and popular fiction that uses a first person voice or narrator. These works allow me to get up close and personal with the author, to get inside their thinking a bit. Of course, as Wayne Booth pointed out so well many years ago, just because you feel comfortable with someone doesn’t necessarily mean that they are reliable.

In fact, one of the obvious reasons for an author to choose a first-person narrator is precisely so that we will trust him/her and act as unsuspecting accomplices in his/her plot. Such is the case with
Chief Bromden in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein. From the cinema archive we have movies like The Usual Suspects that, upon finishing our viewing, leave us unsure if anything we have seen is reliable or even actually occurred.

I bring all of this up because first-person narrators are one of the things I like most about blogging. I enjoy getting to know the various personalities involved, the nuances and eccentricities that are personal and unique to each. I enjoy the passion that comes with the individualism and I believe the dialogue their pleas engender are important. But, as a practiced reader, I do not read blogs under the illusion that they are somehow neutral or unbiased as individual narratives. In fact, I assume in the course of my reading that individual blogs are likely unreliable (especially this one).

Bloggers may not be deliberately unreliable in the way a fictional narrator can be, but they are unreliable in that they do not (usually by design) tell us the whole story. Such is the nature of any first-person narrator who is not omnisciently divine.

It is, I would argue, this unreliability that makes blogging and reading blogs entertaining. It is also what can makes blogs particularly useful in communities (dialogues between blogs). Unlike their fictional counterparts that are closed systems, blogs are open by nature and are communal. They are intended to foment dialogue with other blogs. And it is this community of selfish voices or unreliable narrators that create a well-rounded discussion about issues that is, at least by some definitions, objective.

In this way, a blogging community, while extremely subjective and unreliable in its individual pieces, can be objective and reliable as a collection of voices. It is a different approach to truth and one that requires a mature reader who is willing to act as participant and co-conspirator. Given these elements, however, I might suggest that the goals of ultimate objectivity can be achieved with far greater reliability using blogs than it can through traditionally “objective” approaches or other forms of narratives such as print journalism or Wikipedia.