Curt Purcell keeps the discussion about the potential impact of a centralized host-driven linkblog on the horror blogosphere going in a new post on the topic. (Earlier: here and here and here and here.) In it he includes a gentle reminder to me to post regarding the positive impact such blogs can have in terms of the obnoxious fannish tendencies a cohesive, collective blogosphere can display. Frankly, I'm not sure there is one beyond leading by example. If a Big Important Linkblog manages to avoid indulging the kinds of myopic, know-it-all behaviors that Bruce Baugh lays out here much more coherently than I've done in any of my posts, well, that's one less blog doing so, and a prominent one at that. I don't think their impact would go that far beyond that, however. Insofar as the big problems I have with cohesive blogospheres stem from the bloggers' mutually reinforced conviction that they're absolutely right about what they choose to talk about, it's not as though any one other blogger can really put a dent in that.

BUT! First of all, it's important to remember that the emergence of a cohesive horror blogosphere would have its own positive aspects, several of which Curt and I have talked about enthusiastically--increased exchange of ideas with one another, exposing genre fans to ways of discussing the genre they might not have had access to before and may get something out of, etc.

Second of all, as J.E. Bennett and ILoz Zoc point out, horror bloggers in the main seem to be a slightly less combative and self-serious bunch than those in more problematic blogospheres. I don't think that's at all true of horror fandom generally--you don't need to look any further than comment threads and forums at the big horror sites to figure that out--but I can say that the horror blogs I read tend not to stoke the fires of faux outrage or make proclamations regarding what kinds of horror count or don't count. Then again, there's obviously some selection bias in that group. But who knows, maybe a more interactive group of horror bloggers would remain less given to belligerence and dogma.

I think the biggest problem facing the creation of a horror blogosphere is that it's based on a genre, not a medium. The comics blogosphere is, after all, about comics, and Scott McLoud notwithstanding it's basically easy to understand what constitutes comics: comic books, graphic novels, manga, BD, editorial cartoons, comic strips, etc. Even if you factor in occasional digressions into illustration proper or animation or superheroes in other media or nerd-culture in general, it's clear that while different comics bloggers' tastes may vary, it will at least be clear to each that the other is, in fact, a comics blogger.

Horror is different in that it's based entirely on qualitative judgments regarding what horror is, which means that differences in personal taste have a lot more impact on whether we can even agree we're blogging about the same subject. I mean, as Curt and I have discussed in the past, our interests in terms of the genre have very little overlap, and in some fundamental ways we disagree on what constitutes horror in the first place. Now, we're both broad-minded or informed or whatever enough to acknowledge each other's interests in horror as horror, but multiply us two by however many other horror blogs there are with however many other interpretations of and interests in and takes on and views of the genre those blogs have, and it becomes that much more difficult to create a cohesive feel.

Any centralized, hosted horror linkblog is going to have to deal with this, and it might end up being difficult. Again, when Dirk Deppey or Tom Spurgeon looks around the internet for things to link to, it's pretty easy for them to figure out what qualifies as "comics." Taste enters into what they choose to link to to a certain extent, but here there's the added wrinkle that whatever their differences they both have what is generally considered to be "good taste" in comics--both of them having been in charge of the English language's preeminent comics criticism magazine, for example. But for horror, how would such a blogger figure out where their purview begins and ends? What does "good taste in horror" even mean? It's so much more subjective than the problems faced by comics linkbloggers...which might mean that the subjective will become the objective out of sheer necessity and cause even more of the problems I was talking about before. Or it might mean that a horror linkblog, and the horror blogosphere in general, becomes a lot more open to the kinds of "blog what you feel" blogs that Bruce Baugh is talking about.

My point, I suppose, is...I don't know that I have one, as a matter of fact. I'm kind of just thinking through the pros and cons. Both exist, and while one might outweigh the other for a given reader or blogger, certainly neither can erase the other.

Posted by Sean T. Collins at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)