There is a fascinating discussion going on at Ecotone about the idea of blogs as place rather than being about place.
I'm currently trying to read a hefty book called "The Production of Space" by Henri Lefebvre. According to the blurb this is about:
a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live).
Now my reading of this so far is still patchy and incomplete but what is interesting in the present context however is actually a comment by the translator to the effect that:
English speaking experts tend perhaps not to use the word 'space' with quite the same facility as their French speaking counterparts use the word espace, but they do have a corresponding fondness for such spatial terms as 'sector' and 'sphere'. (footnote p8)
Now what I think that means is that the idea of non-physical space is more than just a metaphor - and I think I agree. Lefebvre is probably not the first to make that point. His book dates from 1974while about 10 years before that another writer, Melvin Webber, wrote an article called "The urban place and the non-place urban realm". His argument was that communities of interest no longer depended on propinquity. I haven't been able to find a URL for the article but this is from a paper on a similar theme
In 1964 Melvin Webber challenged the notions of community and centrality used in urban studies by demonstrating that ‘community without propinquity’ was emerging within certain social networks. He argued that individuals were enmeshed in an overlapping range of groups, and that increasingly these social networks were not limited by physical or geographical location.
This is long before the web and even before much of the writing of Ted Nelson so Webber was pretty much ahead of the game. (Interestingly however Nelson coined the term 'hypertext' in 1965!)
What this all means I think is that a weblog, especially one with a wide user base offering commetns and discussion, is a place, incorporating many of the characteristics of a physical locality but adding new features of its own. After all how often do we see terms like 'drop by' etc in relation to someones blog?
Could sites like RedPaper be viewed similarly?
