What is art? Art cannot be described as a process which produces beauty as beauty itself cannot be defined objectively. You can only guess what the aim of art is. According to Tolstoy, the aim of art is to provide pleasure, enjoyment, entertainment as well as creating a relationship between the author and the “receiver”. So is blogging – art?
History of blogs
Blogs were first introduced as weblogs that refer to a “server’s log file.” It was created when web logging hit the virtual market. Since its inception in the mid-1990s, web logging gradually saturated the virtual community making the Internet a viable source of greater information.
Origin of the term “weblog” is uncertain. Many point to John Barger in December 1997 when he coined the term on his own blog. 2 years later, Peter Merholz broke “weblog” into a phrase “we blog”, thus giving birth to the word “blog”. Fortuitously, this play on words eventually took off, and “blog” as a short form not only became a household noun, but also as a verb. With the growth of popularity of weblogs, grew the popularity of the word “blog”. Indeed, in March 2003, the Oxford English Dictionary included the terms "weblog," "weblogging" and “weblogger” in its dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary astonishingly declared “blog” as the word of the year in 2004. (Wikinews,2005)
Starting from the mid-1990 the number of blogs at an incredible pace, at the end of 1999, the total number of blogs was estimated to be around fifty; five years later, the estimates range from 2.4 million to 4.1 million. The site Open Diary, while not using the term blog only until recently, had only two thousand diaries by 1999; by, September 2005, it exploded to 400, 000. The Perseus Development Corporation, a consulting firm that studies internet trends, estimates that by 2007 more than 10 million blogs will have been created. (Drezner and Farrell, “Web of Influence.” 2004).
Blogs as a way of expressing yourself
People who are into blogging carefully choose their words to describe their feelings, emotions and experiences. Leo Tolstoy says in his essay “What is art?”: “Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.”
In a way, bloggers are artists. They create a relationship with their readers, as professional writers and painters do. Blog is own space, their canvas, their book, where they can share their thoughts, feeling, ideas with others, where they can give and receive information.
As with art, you can write anything you want in a blog, but there are thing needed to be taken into account:
• You should make your blog interesting, informative so that it gives rise to readers’ thoughts and feelings.
• Create something beneficial for the readers. Give your blogs some quality content.
• “Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” Frederic Chopin. Avoid being complicated in your blog. The more complicated the blog is – the less it is art.
Blogs as modern art
So what is a blog? Is blogging art? Blog is persons own space in the Internet, his orchestra where he conducts his symphonies, his paper where he writes his essays, his canvas where he paints his masterpieces, in a word – his space where he creates. What is the purpose of the Artist? To create, to communicate the concepts of morality.
Unfortunately not every blog can be categorized as art. Blogs must be comprehensible and understandable. If any unintelligible blog or as any incomprehensible expression of though is to be called “art”, then the meaning of “art” will be lost. Blogs must have the form and content which is are unity with the feeling and ideas which they represents. Blogs that shallow, unsophisticated, awkward, artificial, exaggerated, ostentatious, or banal are not art.
Tolstoy suggests that professionalism kills art; it causes the art to become false and insincere. As long as blogs are kept original, personal and sincere they can be described as art, modern art.
“Generally art is a (product of) human activity, made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind; by transmitting emotions and/or ideas”(Wikipedia, 2008). Blog is a great way to implement this activity online.
All in all, blogs are modern art, as long as you keep them personal, original, honest and smart. Blogs are your free web space and you have all the tools and ideas to create your own masterpiece!
Click here to create your own state-of-art blog.
Tips on how to get more people to view your blog
Materials used:
1. http://www.csulb.edu/~jvancamp/361r14.html
2. http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/tolstoy.html
3. http://www.slais.ubc.ca/COURSES/libr500/05-06-wt1/www/A_Cho/history.htm
