Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience José Ángel García Landa Universidad de Zaragoza
[email protected] http://www.garcialanda.net Blogs and the Narrativity of Experience This paper undertakes an analysis of the narrativity of a form of discourse which has appeared recently (blogs) within the framework of an emergentist theory of narrativity and its discursive modes. The narrative/discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a preexistent ground of more basic or less specific communicative practices; and narrative discursivity itself is an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and experiential phenomena. A number of formal and communicative characteristics of blog writing and of the blogosphere are discussed as emergent modes of experience within the pragmatic context of computer-mediated communication. _________________ 1 We shall undertake an analysis of the narrativity proper to a discursive form of recent appearance, weblogs or blogs, within the framework of an emergentist theory of narrativity and of its discursive modes. The narrative- discursive characteristics of blogs emerge from a prior basis of simpler or less specific communicative practices. And the narrativity of discourse is itself an emergent phenomenon with respect to other cognitive and experiential phenomena which necessarily underpin it, and are the basis on which its emergent nature must be defined. That is to say, there must be processes first, in order for processual representations to exist, and these representations must exist in simple forms before they give rise to complex narrative forms, associated to specific cultural and communicational contexts—for instance, the development of computer-mediated communicative interaction on the Web. Processes - Representations - Narratives - Narratologies Let us begin with absolute generality—with the narrativity of experience itself, situating narratives, and narratology, within an emergentist/evolutionary theory of reality.