Orsai in the Context of Blogs 136

Blogs are a platform in which a lot of literary experimentation has been done. The history of blogs goes back to the early 1990’s, and for its first ten years of existence, blogging was a relatively rare activity. It was not until the “one button publishing” heralded by

Blogger that the new medium really exploded. In 2002 there were 200,000 Blogger users, which in only one year quintupled. When Technoratti published its first “State of the

Blogosphere” in 2004, the report included four million blogs all around the Internet (Part 1). Only three years later, there were 70 million blogs, observing an impressive tendency that the blogosphere was doubling in size every six months (“Blogosphere 2007,” Part 1). Presently, WordPress hosts about 40% of the blogs in the world at over 66 million in which 41.5 million new posts as published and 53.2 million new comments are made on a monthly basis (WordPressStats). The development of blog platforms has been so

astonishing that it is hard not to look at them as a mine of information for studies from all disciplines as well as a phenomenon in itself. A radical change blogs have brought about is, as Bonnie Nardi explains, that "readers can create blogs as much as writers" (“Social Activity,” 225).

The rise of blogging has touched many different writing publishing industries, journalism being one that has felt it most deeply. Nonetheless, literary publishing has also been touched by it. Varied narrative manifestations have taken place on blogs: fan fiction sites, personal-fictional diaries, blognovels, etc. Much of the focus on the impact of blogs upon publishing has been put on the economic change of paradigm in publishing, as well as on the fact that "the blog is in essence, a form of socialized writing” (Cleger 70 translation mine). For Clay Shirky “[blogs] are such an efficient tool for distributing the written word that they make publishing a financially worthless activity.” (“Weblogs,” par. 1). New distribution models of print and electronic books have tried to remedy this by adding layers of security, copyrights and proprietary formats with little success. For Shirky, there are two intrinsic values of traditional publishing: upfront costs and scale of distribution. There needs to be a support system for the production of each copy of a book and a network that distributes it and ensures the upfront costs are recovered. These values have not been, for the most part, eliminated in digital publishing. But they have in one-button publishing, which still has to match the extrinsic value of traditional

publishing: the prestige, and indicators of quality, associated with the process of publishing granted by the economic investment supporting it. According to Shirky, in blogs this value comes after – not before – publication. Weblogs, immersed in a sea of blogs, can easily be ignored if they do not offer something of value to their readers. The filtering, as a result, comes from the readers — an instance of Piérre Lèvy’s collective

intelligence.

The details of copyright laws and the values associated with various modes of publishing in the digital age far exceed the scope of this work. Suffice it to say that, in the new media ecology alternative ways of publishing have made their way and along with them new ways of journalistic and literary composition. The distribution and payment systems in Orsai are examples of this. Because of the multimedia capacities that blogging

platforms among others have progressively incorporated, narratives published on them have rather frequently also incorporated other media. Other media’s contributions to the overall narrative have had different meanings and compositional implications, such as print editions of the blog content. Nevertheless, the one feature of blogs that seems to have had the most impressive and consistent effect through diverse cases is the adoption of commenting tools enabling dialogue among readers and allowing for different levels of audience participation.

Energetically moving away from conventional publishing, Orsai has made every content piece of the project available for free online, through several platforms. Exclusive

contents are not based on payment – as in the case of the print magazine – but on level of involvement, for example, a small group of posts available only to distributors. Most importantly, however, the move away from conventional publishing granted Orsai the possibility to experiment in different media and platforms. Videos published on vimeo.com have been part of the narrative of the project too (Fig. 19), as has been Casciari’s own TedX talk posted on the homepage at editorialorsai.com.

As argued before, Orsai’s passage along media platforms as well as diverse semiotic media grant cohesiveness to the project both narratively and actually. The center of the project’s interaction with readers continues to be through the blogs. Originally one and later divided, the three Orsai blogs are the meeting place where authors and readers can engage in exchange and dialogue.

Figure 19 The video made early in 2011 with readers’ pictures of Orsai. Courtesy of Hernán Casciari