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Online Critical Writing 800 Words TAKE TWO
'A ROOM WITH A VIEW' OR A QUESTIONABLE BRIEF FOR AN ONLINE WRITING PLATFORM
The web - with the accessibility, mobility, immediacy and comparative lack of censure it implies - is a distinct room of writing. The diversity of content, style and voice it contains points to the performativity of meaning, the impossibility of consensus and highlights the practice of critical writing as such; as a practice, something contingent, performed, in progress, repeatedly tried, or attempted, with all the challenges and pitfalls trying implies. Online critical writing is indeed a matter of trying, and a trying matter. [See TAKE ONE]. Sat in this particular room, with its simple decor of green on white surrounded by thousands of online texts in their generic web sans serif - tries by authors most of whom I have never met or read online or off - I’m wondering what the characteristics of such a room are and what are the possibilities? How might the web be shaped, tried or essayed by critical writing? And vice versa, how might critical writing be fundamentally shaped or essayed by the web?
HOW MIGHT AN ONLINE WRITING PLATFORM.......
enable a more untimely, non linear writing and reading
essay the way writers do, try or work the something, or subject that is at the heart of critical writing?
perform critical writing as contingent, porous, speculative and uncertain?
represent and nurture the community of writers that manifest it?
Repeat the above question inserting ‘readers’ for writers.
show a text’s position - its trajectory, process and history - within an existing community of texts?
challenge the authoritative, singular critical voice stretching back through (art) history?
be a polyphonic experience, sounding a cacophony of critical voices, rather than just one lone blog post or voice on top of another, with authors missing each other like passing ships in the night?
subvert the dominant archival and market tendencies that sustain the currency of review writing?
differ – ideologically and editorially - from a printed publication?
be written and edited critically, sympathetically and collaboratively?
adopt a critical, post-autonomous position by endorsing the professional relationships, networks and collaborations between its artists, institutions and writers?
enable, and incite you the reader, to activate, re-write or punctuate these questions and so write your own?
Online Critical Writing 800 words TAKE ONE
Online Critical Writing 800 words TAKE THREE
By Rachel Lois Clapham
First published: a-n.co.uk October 2009
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