A last word from Henry Jenkins in a partial copy of an email to Elin which he allowed her to post on her site:BloggerdyDoc.
All of this is a very good illustration of the differences in the level of control authors have over their words in a blog and those which they have in a commercial publication. It is ironic, to be sure, that once these words appear -- because I do not control the press -- I have no real way of responding to what the bloggers are saying. Yet, there's another side to this. When I write in the magazine, I can reach an extremely large public with a single message. Because the blogging community is decentralized, there is no way to adequately respond once the controversy is set into play. In theory, I can respond to any site and hope that the response becomes part of a larger conversation -- as happened to some degree when you post my remarks on your blog -- but in practice, I can only respond to small pockets of bloggers with no hope of addressing them all.

- Yet, it appears that he is at least trying to reach out to the community by accepting using Elin's blog as an outlet....But he has a good point (which is also my own experience) - if you really want to tell "the public" about internet phenomena, you still need to use print media!! On the other hand, reflecting on Jenkins claim that he cannot target all bloggers and reach "an extremely large audience" as he can in print media, it could be interesting to do some calculations on readership: say that Jenkins is initially quoted & commented in 100 blogs who all have between 50-100 readers in average. That would be 10.000 readers all in all, some of whom would probably also link and comment in their posts etc ad infinitum. And readers actually Read blogs, in comparision to print journals which people might in fact just leaf through - for instance never reading that article on blogs. So if we are talking numbers, perhaps a study of which text actually got the most readers in the end would come up with the blogtext as the winner.
- An intriguing thing is going on here (twisting Jenkins words slightly): publishing in a print article allows you to control your audience in that you as author have a good idea who many are reading it and who they are - but you cant respond to their reactions immediately or in an unmediated way. With a blog you cannot control your audience (there is no way of of measuring the demographics of all the people reading all the blogs), but you can communicate with them instantly if you feel the need. It makes me think; is blogging closer to being a modern form of oral culture than traditional print is? Blogging is very much about writing (be it in a "professional" or "amateurish" manner) I know, but as a communication media, perhaps it has more of the immediacy of orality - this spreading by "word of mouth" which can pervade an entire community in no time??
# posted by Lisbeth at: 12:26