BoingBoing: Blogging the Internet Aesthetic

Written for Dr. Aram Sinnriech's Intro to Media Criticism course in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU.

December '07

The blog BoingBoing.net does something right when it comes to channeling the desires of internet users to attract visitors, viewers, and devoted readers. Currently, it BoingBoing ranks as the 3rd most popular blog on Technorati’s top-100 most popular blogs on the web, and draws around 1 million dollars in ad revenue over the course of a year (Tozzi, 2007). Also, in 2004 BoingBoing was one of only two blogs ranked in the top-15 of 5 different measurements of influence in the blogosphere (Gill, 2004). Ranking high in these measurements suggests that BoingBoing acts “as both an information aggregator and as a ‘summary statistic’ for the blogosphere” (Drezner and Farrell, 2004), shaping and reflecting the aesthetic norms of media on the World Wide Web. BoingBoing, in its design and content choices, embodies an aesthetic unique to the media of the internet at a particular historical moment, thus explaining its popularity and influence.

Attempting to examine a website as a media text poses a slight pedagogical problem. Websites, blogs in particular, undergo constant revision, making it difficult to pin down a stable text for study. Finding a final referent text for study will prove impossible, as “completion may be endlessly deferred in the medium in which everything is always ‘under construction’” (Deuze, 2006). BoingBoing itself averages roughly 20 posts a day, and posts will be added as I write this paper. While this speedy “first-mover advantage” (Drezner and Farrell, 2004) means that blogs end up shaping the narratives of traditional media texts, it requires a shift from traditional analysis as to how texts should be examined. Instead of merely studying the content of individual posts or the content overall, my arguments about BoingBoing will focus first on the form in which content is presented, using the notion of ‘blogging’ itself, the aesthetic choices in the layout of the site, and later end with an examination of the content through the semi-structural element of ‘tagged’ content posted to the site. The structural elements remain relatively stable throughout the site and over time, making them more appropriate objects for examination through a more traditionally stable media such as academic composition.

Before all else, BoingBoing is a blog. Blogs can be identified as “a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first” (Walker, quoted in Deuze, 2006); although in order to qualify for a “Bloggie” weblog of the year award, a site must be merely a “page with dated entries.” Blogs typically include “[l]inks to related news articles, documents, blog entries within each entry (attribution) • Archived entries (old content remains accessible) • Links to related blogs (blogrolling) • RSS or XML feed (ease of syndication) • Passion (voice)” (Gill, 2004). The specific function of blogs can be different from site to site, but in the case of BoingBoing, the site identifies itself as a “Directory of Wonderful Things” immediately below its red, pixel-form logo/title. This corresponds with one primary function of blogs in general, serving as “’intelligent filters’ for their publics by selecting, contextualizing, and presenting links of particular interest” (Rheingold, Forthcoming). Considering the vastness of the internet, a ‘directory’ of links (particularly one that sorts out the ‘wonderful’ ones) is a valuable thing, because “given search costs and limited time, it is near impossible for readers to sift through the vast amounts of available material in order to find the interesting posts” (Drezner and Farrell, 2004). Blogs are particularly suited for the ‘directory’ function, and one of the successes of BoingBoing can be attributed to its effective embrace of this particular activity.

Still, blogs should be further distinguished from other types of sites which sort and filter information on the internet. In particular, publication by specific, identified authors (“voice” in the above list) links blogs to more traditional print-media, and distinguishes them from other link directory intelligent-filter sites (like Wikipedia, Google or FARK.com). Blogs don’t merely filter, they filter through the eyes of a specific author - a blogger. The importance of the author in the blogosphere can be shown by the relatively high popularity of blogs run by “professionals with excellent writing skills” (Gill, 2004), and by the easy adoption of blogs by traditional media sources including “MSNBC, Slate, the Washington Post, the Christian Science Monitor, the Seattle Times – almost anywhere Big Media produces online news” (id). BoingBoing fits the mold, with a internet-geeky twist. The blog features four primary bloggers/editors – Mark Frauenfelder, Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz, all of whom have some degree of professional writing experience (books, Wired magazine, and other serials). While Frauenfelder founded the site, the most prolific posters, Xeni Jardin and Cory Doctorow, have gained individual notoriety as a result of their contributions, demonstrating the importance of authorly voice to the blog. Doctorow has become a globally-recognized ‘copyfigher,’ an author of cyber-punk fiction, and cartoon character. Jardin has become a "technology contributor for National Public Radio's "Day to Day," and host of NPR's "Xeni Tech" podcast,” among other public roles, according to her bio from her website, Xeni.net. The individual notoriety of the blog’s authors demonstrates the personal nature of blog authorship, in contrast to the open collaboration of other internet forms, as well as the importance of charismatic and effective writers in shaping a blog’s success. The importance of authorial voice can be traced back to the ‘directory’ function of blogs. Insofar as the internet has a simply overwhelming amount of content, a sharp eye for creating commentary on important and interesting links is a decisively valuable asset for a site. In this way, BoingBoing acts like the Google for a particular culture and aesthetic, sorting and prioritizing news, video, and sites of interest through the voice of its writers. BoingBoing’s specific bloggers should be understood as a key element in the blog’s success.

Additionally, the visual appearance of the blog elucidates the choices which have made BoingBoing such a popular blog. Operating with a digital, malleable environment gives the creators of websites near-infinite choices in shaping the appearance of text and graphics on a user’s screen. The range of choice suggests that the actual appearance of a site on a user’s screen should be taken as a very deliberate, rather than forced choice. That being said, the meaning and form of BoingBoing cannot be separated as “digital writing environments make it difficult to separate words from visuals or privilege one over the other” (Hocks, 2003). Specifically, the visual appearance of BoingBoing emphasizes the creative elements of blogging and the internet. Indeed, the site has developed its own ‘iconography’ which defines the blog categorically and visually. The icons, and the logo/title at the top of each page, feature a pixilated, blocky style indicative of the age of “digital reproduction” (Davis, 1995) where works of art exist solely in the form of bits and bites, with no original non-reproduced referent. With these visual features, the blog whole-heartedly embraces the reproductive and capacities of digital production. The style carries on into the ‘body’ of the blog, where posts are displayed. The site uses a uniform, plain black Times New-Roman font on a white background, with links a blue-green, and red when moused-over. This style downplays flashy presentation, instead drawing attention to the content, alluding to the ‘directory’ tagline by presenting information in a plainly effective, accessible way. Quotes from other sources are juxtaposed against this simple style by larger, red quotation marks. The quotes allow readers to visually scan the document and quickly distinguish the blogger’s commentary from outside sources. Prominent, high-visibility red quotes act as visually expanded links, clearly demarcating the blogger’s work from that of outside sources. The style closely parallels a standard hypertext link, which similarly assembles multiple texts into a single document, establishing “personally tailored paths through textual spaces” (Tyrkko, 2007) by selecting and highlighting important parts of other sites. The design elements embody the reading-sorting function of blogs, visually easing and embracing the social function of blogs as a link-filter in a complex internet media environment.

The ‘tagging’ structural feature of the blog blurs the line between form and content. BoingBoing labels most of its posts with tags, using the categories ‘book,’ ‘art,’ ‘video,’ ‘photo,’ ‘gadgets,’ ‘comics,’ ‘civlib,’ ‘maker,’ ‘copyfight,’ ‘funny,’ ‘steampunk,’ and ‘sex.’ Entries can be viewed sorted by tag, and any one entry can have multiple tags. While the explicit tagging tool is recent, older posts reflect the same general subjects of the tags. Tagging connects the ‘what’ viewers look for on a blog with ‘how,’ dividing out particular posts into filtered mini-blogs. The sorting function of the media itself becomes content as users filter now a variety of entries from different blogs through tag-clouds on sites like Technorati, making the sorting tool an important draw to blogs. The tags serve as the jumping-off point for understanding the content choices of BoingBoing, content which similarly merges the distinctions between form and content by creating content that embraces the capabilities of its specific media and overall structure as a blog. Two key themes – copyright and remix culture – constitute the bulk of posts from BoingBoing, and will be the focus of my discussion of what is written on the blog.

BoingBoing describes its oppositional stance to the expansion of copyright controls as ‘copyfight.’ The ‘fight’ seeks to protect the ability of users to view and copy media as they see fit. The discussion of copyright on BoingBoing mainly concerns a backlash against an ongoing crackdown by media distributors over control of content on the Internet. Commitment to the ‘copyfight’ runs deep on the blog: the struggle is personal for Doctorow as a published sci-fi writer, and evidence of the blog’s commitment appears even in very early posts to the blog. However, a rigorous defense of copyright only makes sense in a political environment that encourages rapid encroachment on traditional copyright use. The perceived need for copyright protection arises as the result of global economic and political shifts which now define corporate commerce: “brainpower drives the modern economy: there are more demands to own ideas… technological change has made it harder to protect ideas… globalization has made it easier for intellectual property to spread to parts of the world with weaker protection of ideas… [and] the output of the "idea industry" has grown exponentially” (Evans, 2002). Because media-industry’s reaction to these developments, a series of US laws and international trade agreements have been used to expand the scope of what falls under copyright protection, as well as the tools available to companies to enforce copyright claims (Coombe and Herman, 2004, Vaidhyanathan 2005a, b, and c). Recently, “copyright-producing industries” have “started a steady movement to shift the site of regulation from civil courts to machines themselves” (Vaidhyanathan, 2005c). Regulating machines is the crucial issue for Doctorow and BoingBoing: the “encroachment many see of recent copyright legislation on personal liberties and well-established habits” (Vaidhyanathan, 2005b), specifically insofar as they involve directly modifying code and physical technology on individual user’s computers. (The modification of user’s personal computers links ‘copyfight’ and ‘civlib’ (civil liberties) tags – BoingBoing essentially seeks to defend the ability of individual users to use the Web as they see fit without interference or tracking from companies or the government) The ongoing attempts to limit the freedom of users on the internet to view and copy media content serves as the background for the blog’s ‘copyfight.’

BoingBoing’s response to the industry on the question of how to manage the flow of information on the internet is framed by its ‘linking policy,’ which controls who can appropriate its content by linking to the blog. BoingBoing’s only linking policy is that sites must not have any conditions in their linking policies to link to BoingBoing. As this shows, the blog unequivocally stands behind the free flow of information over the Web, and puts this stand into practice. In the words of Cory Doctorow, “the web is open.” The linking policy illustrates the connection of media-form to BoingBoing’s particular defense of the rights of users. Using the World Wide Web and hyperlinking content necessarily infringes on some corporate-devised notions of copyright. So, BoingBoing’s defense of copyright user’s rights constitutes an embrace of the things that its users already do by the fact of reading BoingBoing, a site where the bloggers link (‘borrow’) media from other sites. BoingBoing supports the rights of users in other ways. For example, the blog acts as a rallying point for specific political battles fighting copyright expansion, with recent successful campaigns aimed at Canadian and Swiss versions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (a particularly draconian US law concerning digital copyright management).The technological reality of the internet puts older media companies in an uncomfortable position in relation to BoingBoing’s argument – the fact that users already engage in activity that threatens the old media monopoly means they are less likely to accept arguments for increasing the power of that monopoly, and more likely to back protection of the rights of users.

The effectiveness and popularity of BoingBoing’s political stand also depends on other cultural factors which determine the salience of their argument, even as technology uses come to their aid. In the first place, the bulk of what is called ‘piracy’ operates as resistance from individual users “positioned against a global recording industry that no longer adequately serves the needs of its audience;” an industry now characterized by aesthetic and corporate consolidation of media production (Sinnreich, under review). Also, increasingly harsh and invasive protection measures invite increasingly creative subversions: “[e]fforts to curb or damn up the flow of information generate opposition and indignation, and end up undermining the very norms they hope to bolster” (Vaidhyanathan, 2005b). The mere act of attempting to tightly regulate media use invites cultural backlash. The history of copyright protections rhetorically aides the position of ‘copyfighters,’ insofar as “[t]he movie and music industries are now like the boy who cried wolf” (Evans, 2002), claiming that each and every shift in technology will destroy their industry. The history of bad predictions, this time backed with increasingly invasive technologies which inspire resentment against a humorously incompetent industry makes BoingBoing’s steadfast commitment to ‘copyfights’ both popular and necessary for the perpetuation of the open Web.

The bricoleur’s remix style, a second key theme of BoingBoing, shares the resistant posture of copyfight politics. A mode of reading media products in resistant ways, “bricolage simultaneously consists of repurposing and refashioning the old while using and making the new” (Deuze, 2006). The style has manifested itself on the internet in a variety of ways, such as “slash…video game modding… [and] mash-ups” which “take advantage of the available means of production (i.e. copy machines, editing and modding software) and distribution (i.e. the postal system, the internet) to subvert the traditional consumer-producer dichotomy” (Sinnreich, under review). Evidence of the remix style appears everywhere on the blog: at least two tag categories (‘steampunk’ and ‘maker’) concern remix and modding exclusively. Also, regular links to photoshop contests, older posts about Ron English billboard modifications, computer case mods, old media forerunners to do-it-yourself remixing such as ‘paint by the numbers’ books, as well as more recent posts about Hello Kitty bike tires and dis/reassembly of iPods cast in resin all demonstrate the blog’s interest in the remix aesthetic. Doctorow’s short story “Other People’s Money” (although not for BoingBoing exclusively) provides the paradigm for the ‘maker’ tag, describing futuristic subversive production using on the trash of old consumer electronics. The category includes posts about creative production using everyday objects in atypical ways, including park benches made of pencils, lamps made of cocktail parasols, and animal sculptures made from scrap metal. The idea of the remix extends to the idea of creating original interfaces to more ordinary devices, such as a 7 foot tall Atari Joystick, or using a cockroach to control a robot. These examples demonstrate the importance of the notion of bricolage to the blog. The popularity of the site insofar, as it involves this notion, reflects a particular technological and cultural moment that coincides with the creation of BoingBoing.

Remix culture has both cultural and technological origins. The technological origins begin with the development of media technologies that empower individuals to transform the ways in which they view media. Even before the development of the internet, “zapping and surfing (and, why not, twirling the radio dial)” acted as “tools for selecting, cutting up, editing, and manipulating the tide of images and sounds” (Boisvert, 2003). Also, as pointed out above, copy machines and various kinds of editing software are recent technological developments which enable the development of a mass remix aesthetic. The World Wide Web, particularly the use of hypertext links in a blog-style, extends these technological developments to their most-realized form yet. First, BoingBoing itself operates like a textual ‘mash-up,’ combining news and images from disparate sources into a single media text, putting them in conversation with each other as a semi-coherent assembly. The phenomenological experience of reading BoingBoing and clicking on hyperlinks embodies this as well, as “the primary function of the hyperlink is to act as a point of interaction between the text and the reader … a significant departure from the conventions of texts which are more strongly predicated on the non-interactive reception of (usually) thematically organised discourse” (Tyrkko, 2007). Clicking on a link forces a user to create a narrative of continuity that examines the linked-to site for its connections to the site linked from. Not unlike the punning mashup titles such as “The Grey Album” or “Smells like Booty,” the hypertext link creates a “fuzzy coherence” that is “contingent upon both a wide variety of idiosyncratic interpretations and upon personally tailored paths through textual spaces” (Tyrkko, 2007). Essentially, the link-focused assemblage of news stories on blogs allows readers to interactively read separate media texts together as they might do when selecting songs for a potential mashup. Still, these technological changes mean only so much without the cultural impetus to use them. The cultural roots of remix/bricolage culture arise from “the increasing unpopularity of mainstream corporate media” as well as the history of “’DIY’ (do-it-yourself) culture, particularly flourishing during the 1990s, with people increasingly claiming the right to be heard rather than be spoken to” (Deuze, 2007). BoingBoing arose out of this culture, originally appearing in 1988 as a zine run by Mark Frauenfelder & Carla Sinclair. Sinclair (the wife of blog editor Frauenfelder) herself said in an interview “if you're a publisher you don't have to kowtow to anyone … You can say what you want, and talk about stuff the mainstream publications avoid either out of fear or ignorance.” This desire to empower consumers by making them into publishers also lies at the core of its commitment to fighting copyright, as well as the embrace of bricolage. Indeed, record labels in particular have used copyright violations as an impetus to shut down mash-up artists (Sinnreich, under review). The issue of empowering users lies at the core of BoingBoing’s embrace of bricolage, and again demonstrates one of the causes of the blog’s continuing popularity.

Even so, these choices appear on other internet sites as well; one distinguishing feature of BoingBoing’s appropriation of remix culture is its remediation of other, pre-internet media forms. Remediation occurs as the result of media change, where “every new medium diverges from yet also reproduces older media, whereas old media refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media” (Deuze, 2006 paraphrasing Bolter and Grusin, 1999). BoingBoing creatively remediates media in a variety of ways. First, Cory Doctorow’s writings, publicized heavily on the site, remediate books into the internet, writing cyber-punk fiction published for free over the internet, as well as in bound form. Also, BoingBoing recently added a video blog, BoingBoingTV, which appropriates the older technology of television onto the internet. Also, the tags ‘video’ and ‘steampunk’ both remediate separate technologies, the latter visually integrating relatively recent technologies, such as web-cams with the aesthetics of Industrial revolution-era steam technology. Last, BoingBoing’s choice in links and content illustrates the importance of remediation. Some recent posts include video of an author reading a book at an internet company, and the transformation of several visual icons into art projects in cloth. Essentially, remediation acts as the “remix of old and new media” (Deuze, 2006), and is the primary form which media production takes on the internet, particularly on sites like YouTube (as in ‘cathode-ray’), or ‘internet radio’ stations like Pandora. BoingBoing’s use of remediation makes its content accessible to users familiar with older media, while at the same time transcending those forms in a creative way. Each of these examples demonstrates BoingBoing’s specific form of bricolage – a style which creatively appropriates media forms, as well as specific content in a way unique to the World Wide Web.

As one of the world’s most popular blogs, the aesthetics of BoingBoing indexes the aesthetic norms of the internet in general. It’s choices in form and content emphasize the strengths of the web as a media form, providing an outlet for frustration with and backlash against companies who control older media. BoingBoing demonstrates one of the most effective ways for creating meaning through blogging and the World Wide Web.

Works Cited

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