Poster Quotes to Ponder

#1:
"Television changes us into creatures with visual dominance not by what it says but by its (technical) mode of communication. And so it is with all media, although I would argue that the pertinent object of change is not the sense ratio but rather the human-machine interface, the general construction of the self, indeed the basic features of culture" (p. 38).

#2:
"One danger to be avoided in this process is to configure the non-Western societies as victims of advanced technology. Quite the reverse can be argued: those who benefit most from the dissemination of global media are those whose local values are most put in question (Chow 1996). They are the ones who might gain significantly from the foreign 'invasion' in having the opportunity of critical self-reflection and developing the most innovative responses and adaptations for the benefit of all" (p. 83).

#3:
"The digitization of narrative that enables an extreme separation in space between narrator and listener, as well as an instantaneity of transmission of the narrative and response to it, and requires a globally networked machine mediation that envelopes the narrative" (p. 129).

Quotation Please

Here the magnificient bitties are. Enjoy them as you would a crumbly and hot piece of apple crunch cake.

Fantabulous Quotation Un:
"Hybridity of cultural objects and their continual transformation in planetary exchanges now form the matrix of human experience" (23).

Fantabulous Quotation Deux:
"The conflict of the colonizer and colonized characterizes the entire trajectory of Western globalization, but in each phase of that history, the figure of the colonizer and the figure of the colonized take on different dimensions and are fraught with different patterns of strife" (28).

Fantabulous Quotation Trois:
"In the end, Samuel Beckett's 'What does it matter who speaks?' poses the challenge of a planetary system of networked information machines and human assemblages. Until we develop a critical theory that is able to raise this question in our media context, we cannot expect to contribute significantly to the formation of a discourse of postnational democratic forms of power" (65).

Three pithy quotes: "Information Please"!

p. 158: "...I urge a Nietzschean perspective that explores the good and the bad in the culture of the virtual. The moral positions of the master and the slave, which Nietzsche analyzed so trenchantly, take as their communication context oral and print culture. Moralities of good and bad, and good and evil, growing out of these contexts apply at best partially to information society.... He proposed a "transvaluation of all values"with an eye to the enhancement of "life" ( italics mine)[ Nietzsche 1966]. While his project contains many difficulties, his method of cultural transformation may serve as a starting point for rethinking ethics in an information age" AND... (Nietzsche)"One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star"-- Nietzsche's moral elite charismatically (italics his) and without force (PULL!) draws others within its moral circle, thereby enhancing the "life"or affirmation of life for all."

* * *
p. 173: "The home has become infinitely permeable to the outside world, with the result that the coherence of the culture of the nuclear family (i mine) has been fragmented into what I call the segmented family (Poster 1991). Each member of the family [for "member of the family" substitute here "student in the classroom- as per Tuesday night's discussion about the lack of a 'mainstream' identity among students--- as evidenced by classroom discussions of films seen/ music heard etc.] now sustains a separate cultural world (i mine) within the family."

* * *
p. 197: "Copyright law (mine) is the chief means by which large corporations in general and music firms in particular attempt to control culture ("). In the words of Kembrew McLeod, "Intellectual property law reinforces a condition whereby individuals and corporations with greater access to capital can maintain and increase unequal social relations" (McLeod 2001)..." Digitization threatens the media corporations because one no longer requires great amounts of capital to produce, reproduce, modify, and distribute cultural objects... Copyright was instituted to promote innovation in society, to improve the quality of life for all."
( from Peter Barnes' Capitalism 3.0: "... the U.S. Constitution gave Congress authority "to promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." Shortly thereafter, in 1790, the first American copyright law gave authors the same deal as in Britain: exclusive rights for fourteen years, with an option to renew for another fourteen. After that, their work entered the public domain.The idea wasn't so much to expand intellectual property rights as to set boundaries on them. Indeed, what we call intellectual property today was then considered a monopoly privilege granted by the state, not a right belonging to a creator" (119).
The word which keeps popping in my head is "territorialities".
Poster, p. 33: "Postcoloniality depended on a stable geography of nations" (and of values, of religious proscriptions, of family structure, of property, of law--) "... the nation remained the matrix of the political... the nation state and the corporation ... individuals no longer form identities exclusively through local practices."
What all of this is saying to me is that real estate, including geography and cultural practices are shifting from the analog version to an unanchored digital one. We are truly adrift in some new sea whose boundaries shift with tide and storm---- both forseen and unforseen events.

Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs

In "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs," the authors make an argument for the use of weblogs in the writing classroom. Using Rebecca Blood's vision for blogging as a classroom tool, the authors presented a study of students which examined their behaviors and attitudes toward blogging as a class assignment in various writing courses, for example, "Creative Writing" and "Poetry of Rock." Through survey data and observation, the principal investigator examined the motivation, willingness, and enjoyment of blogging. As the article progresses, the authors introduce the following key terms: remediation, genre, and motivation, and then discuss how each term applies to their study. Their driving question was, "which weblog genre(s) (if any) engage or motivate students to make significant contributions to their personal or class weblog?” They assumed that students would find academic value, as well as personal satisfaction. Their results were not conclusive but they discovered students did value the personal and expressive aspects of blogging, more than they recognized the scholarly benefits.

My initial response to this article was that blogging should be used in writing classrooms. However, I believe that the authors entered this research project with an extremely idealized vision of students' attitudes, typified by Rebecca Blood's overly optimistic vision of blogging. As I examined their results, it was interesting and affirming to see that my hypothesis would have proved accurate. First-year writing students, on the whole, did not see the academic value of blogging as a scholarly pursuit whereas graduate students had a better grasp on the possibilities.
Regardless of the way it is presented, blogging was still considered a class assignment by most.

I feel quite sure that blogging does remediate, in a sense, other writing tools in the college classroom. However, it was noted that students appreciated the social quality of the blogging world more than a technique to improve academically. Given the social networking among most college students, it is apparent that blogging is familiar and accessible. Educators should attempt to meet students where they are - and if their world is collaborative and online - then that is a place where learning can occur. However, technology alone is often expected to do more than it actually does. Teachers must create the possibility for blogging experiences to extend students' critical thinking skills in a way that capitalizes on the social aspect while also adding depth to their knowledge.

Freire in Blogland

Summary
In “The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution,” Christine Boese discusses two issues associated with blogs: first, the impact of a journalist’s personal blogs on professionally affiliated organizations, and, second, the “disruption” klogs cause in a small workplace. The discussion is grounded in the connection Boese makes between blog culture and Paulo Freire’s notion of “critical consciousness.” Boese’s expectations for the role of blogs in the workplace are not met, as media competition, posting anxiety (fear of publishing what ought not be published), and internet discomfort and unfamiliarity problematize many writers’ blogging practices. Finally, Boese suggests that, in line with Freirean theory, that blogging media set alongside mass media is the “key to an open society,” that it’s a checks-and-balances system on the Internet, and that it’s not yet functioning as it should—and can—because of hierarchical forces similar to those described in Freire’s work.

Reflection
I was excited to see Paulo Freire’s work as a part of this text because I’d recently finished Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the first time, and I wanted to see whether his ideas coalesced with blogging practices the way I’d anticipated. Having just finished a Freirean text, I could easily follow the examples Boese provided, and I found her Freirean addition to the critique to be quite useful as an argument to question blog censorship (or even discouragement, if we can’t justly call it “censoring”). Boese’s discussion of blogs as being “dialogic” (Friere) and as being “oriented toward humanization” resonated most with me because I’m interested in enhancing the distance learning classroom though Freirean pedagogy, and much of what Boese writes coincided with work I’ve been doing that discusses the importance of acknowledging student identity and making connections with them on a personal level in an effort to educate them and bring them into the ongoing conversation that is academia and scholarship.

Response
I’m interested in further investigating the notion that “[b]y design, logs are oriented toward humanization” mostly because there seems to be a stigma (especially in academia) that the computers depersonalize the classroom, that we sacrifice the face-to-face with the implementation of technology in the classroom, that even in PowerPoint presentations, the removal of the self is inevitable. I disagree. I think that the majority of students are more at ease posting comments than they are espousing them in person in a crowded classroom (each of my courses has twenty-two students), and this is direct result of their participation in technology outside of the classroom. One of Freire’s arguments in Pedagogy of the Oppressed is to meet people where they are—in the villages—and to make the education useful and relevant to them. If it doesn’t connect, they won’t connect. Online communication is comfortable for incoming college students, and making use of this has its advantages: they are able to speak freely and to create an identity in writing. In this way, technology-equipped and online classrooms afford students voices they might not have (or wish to withhold) in the traditional classroom.

Can I Get a What What?: Journalists cope with being cool

Brian Carroll's essay, Culture Clash, focuses on the struggle of "old media" journalists to adopt and adapt to the Age of the Blog. While arguing against a dichotomous relationship between the two, Carroll emphasizes the need of traditional journalism to adapt to not only the method of blogging, but also the unique demands of its audience.

Looking at both the positive and negative social consequences of blogging from a journalistic perspective, Carroll provides a couple of interesting examples of journalists and executives practicing both personal and professional blogging. In one of these examples, he makes use of a case from The Virginian Pilot newspaper, which used blogging to provide live coverage of the sniper trial of John Allen Muhammad since TV and radio coverage had been banned by the judge. The blog was wildly successful. Carroll points out several notable features of this case study in regards to the effects of blogging, including:

* The blogger enjoyed the experience, because it brought his role in the community in which he was participating to the fore.
* Despite not having the same internal review process as a regular news article, blogging still allowed for an important revision process that also contributed to the relationships between members of the blog community. The author received instant feedback regarding errors, etc. that he instantly posted to the blog as corrections.
* Readers indicated they not only were they more pleased with this type of experience than with simply reading a newspaper article, they found it to also be more accurate reporting

Carroll was unable to address certain key concerns in this article, including how newspapers might use new media such as blogs to their financial advantage. While it may not have been "within the scope" of his essay, I think the issue of profit is necessary to address if one's argument is directed at a business industry, especially a struggling one like print newspaper.

In the comment section of the chapt-o-blog, Dennis G. Jerz notes that it might be more useful to deal with the issue from a "revolutionary" perspective rather than a democratic one. We have beaten around both those bushes in class, and I think that the case can be made (or should at least be explored in an article like this) that the convergence of these media might be a serious threat to businesses (like newspapers, but also like the RIAA, book publishers and the pro-new media corporations like Google as well) because of its inherent tendency to, as Carroll puts it "encourage [and reward] the values of the communal ethos." Not only is there limited economic incentive, but the authority of institutions can be entirely (?) undermined in the blogosphere, where the audience and authors have not only an instantly amplified voice, but also more say in the norms and practices of the group. In regards to journalism, which in an ideal world is motivated by information more than money, an entire heirarchy of practices, from information gathering, to writing and editing, to dissemination, is wiped out by blogging.

We have seen this battle before with Jenkins and television examples such as Lost, American Idol and Survivor, and have discussed the limitations of new media relationships between producers and audiences, which seems to come back to the threat the audience poses to the institution's authority and ego as the mastermind. If the dynamics of new media and old media are to be qualified as a "culture clash," as Carroll's title suggests, although I understand the motivation to seek an amicable resolution, I question the merit of avoiding dichotomy entirely. It seems as though new media have a lot to offer our culture, and while they are not without their drawbacks, it seems unfair to let them drown under the weight of bloated corporate egos rather than take the chance to discover the value and meaning these relationships can really have.

Promiscuous Fictions

Tyler Curtain initially focuses on the anxiety that is produced within the blogosphere in his article Promiscuous Fiction. He contents that anxiety is “a subspecies of the reaction to the thick of information that pours out of Google’s search space, and ultimately the Internet itself” (2). He argues that we blog as a way to make the unthinkable, this infinite amount of data, into a space where information can be shaped into knowledge that is created through a communal effort. Curtain concentrates specifically on “queer blogging” as a location where cultural, intellectual, and critical discourses are emerging outside of the world of academia. In order to make his point, he focuses on a blog, Jonno.com, that responds directly to an article written by professor Glenn Reynolds. Here Curtain points out that not only is Jonno questioning the traditional knowledge system, the university, but he also illustrates how it is the interactive nature of the blogosphere, the ability to contribute, question, and/or defend the knowledge being produced, that gives blogs their dynamic quality. “Queer knowledge making has always been a strategy of remaking and remarking: it is not simply recycling images and ideas, but rather of reconstruction” (7). For Curtain, the queer blogosphere, and blog communities in general, produce and are produced by a public that challenges the stories told by our culture.
I do agree with Curtain on a number of points, and more and more as I read/learn about the vast diversity of blogs and blog communities that are out there. The knowledge making, which according to Habermas, whose theoretical work Curtain draws on, creates a certain reality that is accepted by all members of the group to which one belongs. And while I agree that there is both power and benefit in creating these communities and producing knowledge, which could change the broader community (society more generally), I can’t help but feel this little niggling in my gut. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but still it persists. I think it must have something to do with the fact that these groups are still so distinct, that while it is clear that Jonno has gone out into the vast depth that is the Internet and brought back to the “queer world” some artifact that he addresses, it is unclear if Reynolds has any interest in hearing what Jonno says. Or it could be that these communities are producing knowledge, more often than not, with like-minded people. But even here I have trouble because Jonno has gone out of his community. Maybe it is that it seems so one sided, at least in the case of the queer community.
I come back to our blogging assignment and think about what I found. I investigated gay blogging communities and must say that I didn’t find very many blogs that addressed these kinds of topics. Even so, in a world where the blogosphere may be the only place where you feel safe to speak your mind, to stretch your thoughts, and exercise your voice, it is easy to see how powerful blogging could be/is. But somehow this sentiment seems to argue against those concerns that I stated above. Could it be the anxiety that Curtain talks about bleeding into the rest of our lives (or perhaps it was always there and is just becoming more apparent)? As you can see, I haven’t quite got it down yet. Blogs are powerful, I agree and we agreed on this in class, but for this case, the gay community, I just don’t see that power so clearly. On an individual level, where a gay person feels safe talking about gay issues, I can see it. But I am just not seeing that power present itself in society in general. And maybe that is the problem I am having. If these worlds remain distinct, will anything change? I guess it is just a matter of time. After the voices have been exercised and the ideas supported by the collective community, I doubt that these worlds will stay so distinct and maybe then that niggling feeling will go away. So this may speak to my own questions and to Becca’s. That knowledge can, and maybe should be, produced anywhere, but when it is it will, I think, be brought to challenge the existing system (whether that be universities, government, or any professionalized world) and will then have to be judged, evaluated, and rejected or incorporated…and that leads to a whole other conversation I realize, but (luckily for me) one that is just past the scope of this argument.

Visual Blogs by Meredith Badger

In her essay, Meredith Badger from Royal Melbourne of Technology discusses about the different ways of viewing on the different mediums. In her article she compares paintings, television programs and films with the Internet. Based on her discussion, the Internet is different than the others since it allows our eyes to skim over the screen. With this action, as readers or audiences, we can find the thing that relates to our interests. In other words, on the Internet, the sources are readily available and accessible to us. This function makes the Internet different from the other sources of visual texts, such as films, television programs or paintings. According to her, weblogs -or blogs- are included in this medium. Also, based on her discussion, blogs deliver the information on a daily bases like newspapers. For me, the difference between blogs and newspapers is their reliability. (The information in the blogs are more personal.) Referring back to the issue about what Badger discusses, weblogs function as conjunctions throughout the Internet. Here, her point is that blogs give different opportunities to the writers or creators to use their own personal preference for the representation (photo, personal information, and so on.) Also, I would like to add that blogs provide different opportunities to readers or researchers to choose from. During this process, we generally feel, as readers, we are in face-to-face discussion forms with the voice of individuals. It is obvious that even though this process seems as private, the Internet makes it communal. People place their daily journals or “blogs” for the world to read and no longer keep a sense of privacy in their lives.

Additionally, this article suggests another important information. For instance, blogs do not care about the gender, age, or race of the writer or information provider. Photographs among other images, if they are used, show this in its entire aspect. Not only for this issue, but also for the visual, the article states that images make the statement stronger. At this point, however, Badger provides more information by comparing words and images. For her, images are the tools to fill the gaps in written text or to make more vivid statements. At this point, I definitely agree what she points out and where she is coming from. Image by itself cannot be enough to make the argument in the blogs. Furthermore, images can create the wrong effects, as she exemplifies in her article with three different pictures related to the Iraqis. Starting from her approach, we can say that images can be used to give false information or itself can create the wrong information. This shows the strong impact of the images on the readers or audiences. Therefore, if blogs flourish with images along with the texts, they become more effective, secure, and trustful. Another point that author added, is how unstable images are serialized. Giving more than one image or picture of the same object, but from different dimension and adding different objects to turn this to a representation of a story, as we see in page 8 of the article. Almost like a flip book of images that represent a story line. Although, as mention previously this can be a false representation of the a story, for instance, the example given in the article about the pillow that was left on the side of the steps. Therefore, one image is not helpful to understand the main concept. Moreover, one image can create a conflict to understand the main issue.

As a conclusion, Badger states that image is the key tool to remember the context, even after we read or research it. I definitely agree with her for this point. For my personal experience, visual blogs attract me a lot and they are not possible to forget. For me, as well, one image is not enough to understand the context since everybody can interpret this with their own experience. Also, without text, even though it is more than one image, images are not useful to reach the target.

SSR for March 20 "Visual Blogs"

Captain, there’s a rift in the space-time continuum

In her essay Visual blogs, Meredith Badger makes the claim that the use of images in weblogs presents a “new aspect of visual literacy grammar, where images must be read in direct relation to the passage of time and as indivisible from the personality of the blogger themselves.” I question the notion that the use of images we see in weblogs is, in fact, new. I also submit that images in weblogs do not force an interpretation that requires a relation to time, that there are instances where the visitor can chose to alter the sequence in which images are viewed, and that this ability has been an option for viewing images long before weblogs.

In any discussion of time, one will naturally be lead to involve a discussion of space, which will lead to a discussion of place. Badger frequently uses these terms without definition, which complicates the reading of her essay. Of space, Badger says that,

“[t]he Internet feels like an intimate space. We tend to view it on our own, and up close; the computer screen is like a face, watching us as we work. The weblog format propagates this sensation; the first person narrative with its confiding tone can make us feel that we are partaking in a one-on-one exchange.”

The interchangeable use of ideas of space and place is common, but it is necessary and useful to separate these two concepts and clearly define them. If we agree with the most widely accepted notion that the idea of place is a subset of the idea of space, then we must immediately question Badger’s first statement about the intimacy of the Internet. I believe that what Badger means to say is that blogs on the Internet feel like an intimate places. The Internet itself is a public space, while any individual site on the Internet is a place, blogs become a more private place than, say, a commercial site, due to the rhetorical voice of the content usually on blog sites, what Badger describes as a “confiding tone.” While I will agree that the social networking of blog rolls and interlinking between blogs can create a sense of community or space within the larger space of the Internet, each blog is an individual place within that community and any moderate investigation into blogs will show that each blog speaks to its audience in varying rhetorical stances. This is why I argue that it is more appropriate to say that some blogs can create a sense of intimacy with their readers rather that the universal statement that blogs do create a sense of intimacy. The Internet is inherently a public space and that the blog only creates a sense of privacy in contrast to what is, by the very nature of its design, a public place. Yet, the question remains, how do some blogs create a sense of intimacy and, further, how does that complicate the separation of the public and private?

Is that your aura or are you just glad to see me?

Badger goes on to say that, “[w]hen we encounter images in weblogs, the sense of entering a private space is enhanced.” Throughout the web, sites use images; how then can we agree that the simple use of images enhances this feeling of privacy? Consider her later statement that, “images give us information about the blogger that text alone may not impart in the same way that our gestures and expressions may give away things about us not reveled by our speech.” Here we can see that Badger is pointing towards images imparting information. There is also the hint that images revel a hidden message, yet later she makes the point that when we encounter images on the web, they cannot always be trusted. She says, “[a]ll we have is the text describing the image and the images vouching for the words.” Here her claims about images producing a sense of intimacy contort and we get a sense that this intimacy can be betrayed. Badger offers a reference to Benjamin’s essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction that may explain this idea further.

In his essay, Benjamin posits that as the work of art is removed from its original location by the act of reproduction, it crosses from the private to the public and hence, the lost of importance, or aura, associated with the original. The key idea here is the connection with place that creates the original. In Badger’s claim, the textual reference surrounding the image is an attempt to recreate the connection to original occurrence and hence, a reconnection to its aura. This is a very interesting idea; one I wish she had spent more time. This connection could prove to be one of the reasons why some blogs can create the sense of intimacy.

Open Internet. Insert time. Repeat until desired effect is reached.

Badger uses the example of images presented in blogs in serial progression is an example of how these blogs ask us “that the images not be viewed alone, but considered in relation to what has come before and what follows” and that “emphasis in weblogs is less on individual images and more about series.” This may be the case in some examples of weblogs, however, this is not the case in all blogs and the navigational options of the visitor to the blog site enable the viewing of images in any order the reader chooses. I believe it is important that our focus should not rest simply on the media choices of some blogs, but on the rhetorical elements we see at work in this larger area of digital composition. The idea of the representation of images as a means to re-create the original aura of the moment captured and of serial images as a attempt to re-create the original time sequence of the event is the real question these rhetorical maneuvers point towards. Blogs, like diaries and journals before them, seek to freeze time in a recoverable medium and yet, with their date stamps or serial images, show the progression of passing time. Blogs are the active production of time in the space of the Internet.

Wrap it up

Although I have made arguments to complicate Badger’s points, I do agree with her when she says that, “[t]he blog medium is one that allows disparate elements and contrasting styles to co-exist harmoniously, rubbing up against each other and influencing that way we respond to the other elements contained there.” No matter what we choose to examine in the blogging community, we must remember that blogging is an actively evolving medium as varied and complicated as the authors that compose them.

Response to "Permiscuous Fictions"

First off, hats off to Becca for starting this conversation. While reading her post it was like she was inside my brain. I, too, was drawn to this essay because of the art of visual grammar. I especially am interested in how it could change academia and public schooling overall. I loved Becca's assessment that navigating the blogosphere can make one feel both "smarter and dumber" at the same time. This paradox is true in many instances when it comes to me and the crashing waves of technology that threaten to wash me ashore. So, Becca's assessment was spot-on and refreshing, and fun to read. I thank her for giving me a springboard for my own discussion.

Other than the art of visual grammar, I was immensely fascinated by Tyler Curtain's discussion of deep vs. surface web. At times, I feel I am simultaneously immersed in them both. While at other times, I feel that, on some level, all web experiences are of the surface variety. There is always the opportunity to dig deeper, do more research, and ask more questions. I was easily seduced by Curtain's definition of promiscuity: "accretion and re-articulation without regard to proper boundaries." I am fascinated by the notion that this "promiscuous fiction" that is blogs, connects people on a level that face-to-face conversation and print publication does not allow. Curtain is also concerned with "queering" and the travesty that its import is often ignored within the hegemonic powerstructure that exists even online. Sexuality and desire are even commodified in unimaginable ways within the blogosphere. Curtain says, "Our hits mean we're hit on." This provocative play on words signals an intimate link between sexuality and online textuality. Furthermore, the link is the primary mode of making a gesture, sexual or otherwise. Finally, Curtain ends with his definition of "public" which entails an "ongoing, unfolding history of readers." Queerblogging, warblogging, techblogging, and other forms of blogging, each form their own niche in the world of blogging. Curtain would suggest, as would I, that these online universes need not exist seperately, but rather collaboratively.

I am totally fascinated by the terminology used in this essay. Curtain's visual grammar is quite striking. The idea of hitting the "refresh" buttom as a discursive means of reproducing time, hoping for new posts, and feeling the incessant need to connect with strangers on a daily basis makes a striking comment about the necessity for human interaction while on a machine. Curtain almost makes this need sound nuerotic; yet, who among us does not refresh our email while reading it to make sure we haven't missed anything new? I think its a combination of the fear of being left out of the loop and not having the most current, up-to-date information available. Technology has allowed us to find out things almost as quickly as they are happening. The need to hit the "refresh" buttom is communal amongst the blogger generation. For some reason, we need to feel like we are informed about what's going on as soon as possible as not to miss out on some opportunity, whether real or imagined. Perhaps it is nuerotic. Or perhaps we are just products of our webiverse and have no control over this kind of impulse. Or do we?

This essay was quite interesting to me because of its treatment of the gay community online. We always hear about and talk about online communities, yet we rarely talk about them in terms of gender and desire. Jonno makes the excellent point that when we ignore "divergent" community's opinions, we are missing out on the opportunity to gain new perspectives and learn something different about ourselves and the communities we live in. Why are we so afraid to try something new and denounce the unfamiliar?

When given this assignment, I immediately printed it out so I could mark it up while reading. But when I got home, I realized that the right side of each page was missing a few words. Determined not to kill another tree, I actually sat at my computer in my robe and read online. I must say, that I have NEVER read an essay online because I do not like sitting in front of a computer for an extended period of time. But I must say, it was rather painless and over before I knew it. It actually may have even been easier to read online since I was able to simultaneously distract myself with various links that I found rather interesting. Of course this is not possible using my old standby material practice.

As far as blogging is concerned, I think everybody, at some point in its development, is partly right about blogging. Its both personal and private, social and academic, and is still in its infancy, I believe. The range of possibilities for online publishing, pedagogy , and other important issues surrounding blogging will continue to unravel for decades to come. This is only the beginning.

Wei: “Formation of Norms in a Blog Community”

The blogosphere as a rhetorical space; once again it’s impossible to avoid the tendency to see the virtual world in architectural/geographical terms, with paths, locations, planned and unplanned communities, deserted, semi-deserted, and populated places; and the purpose, parameters, and conventions of any given space shape the communication going on within. Wei investigates how a blogging community’s culture influences the development and practice of its ‘norms’ – its rules and practices, stated and unstated. She looks at the Knitting Bloggers’s webring, an example of an active community that functions in the real world, the virtual world, and various combinations of the two. Wei explains her method, which involved two coders – herself, familiar with the webring, and another, who was not. She examines stated norms and compared information found in the webring to them. The most interesting finds (for me) were that the English-only rule originated in the desire to protect the ring from being linked to porn sites, something that never would have occurred to me; and the suggestion that at least some communities in the digital world, as in the real world, do the expected (create conditions, parameters, and rules) but also the unexpected. We’ve already encountered the idea that we bring old practices into a new medium, and then find new practices shaped by the medium, and Wei’s study seems to reinforce this.

I’m trying to think about blogging communities in relation to, or in terms of, real or offline communities, while at the same time as unique constituencies boldly going where no group has gone before. They are at once real ongoing interactions and more-or-less permanent records of the same – a historical record of interaction being created simultaneously by groups of people from two or three to thousands. They are human meetings and actions that aren’t merely temporal, occurring and then departing at discrete points along a linear time line; if I joined the Knitting Bloggers’ webring today, I could go back and read and comment on activities that happened a year ago, seeing them as they happened. Time travel is now, in a sense possible. This new space has lost some constraints, even as we try to establish some norms for it.

Wei found that the level of participation (one norm was set for this) varied pretty widely, and this to me is another interesting aspect of blogs that makes me think of virtual reality as an enormous bustling cosmos with as many or more deserted storefronts, parks, and homes as places of activity. Blogs, to paraphrase Woody Allen, are like sharks: they have to be active and moving forward, if not to survive (since I imagine they just stay out there, even if deserted), then to thrive. People simply stop reading blogs if no new material is posted. And yet they remain – as if you wandered into a deserted café and could see a detailed image of all the evenings hosted there.

I didn’t mind reading this material online; there were relatively few hyperlinks and I found interesting the way I judged and selected which ones to follow. In principle and most practice, I like hyperlinks because I’ve always been a hyperlink reader even with print, stopping my reading to make notes of something to look up or looking it up if I had the materials at hand. Hyperlinks are just so damn handy.

SRR for March 20th. Herring et. al and "Women and Children First"

Read the introduction to Into the Blogosphere and then settled on Susan Herring et. al's piece "Women and Children Last: the discoursive constructs of weblogs" out of what seemed like a very enticing group of essays, mainly because I feel like I tend to pigeon-hole myself on certain topics - women and children not being one of them, and because I am sensitive to what I view as the tendency for feminist writings to be overly militant and/or confrontational - I wanted to at least give this one a chance. I was impressed with the comprehensive discussion within the introduction, including the much needed (for me at least) definition of a webblog for the sake of this product - a website that updates frequently with time stamped and reverse chronological ordering - although I still don't know what the MOOS and MUD's referred to are.
Herring's piece catalogues the demographics of blogs, showing that although blogs have long been considered (like the internet itself) empowering and democratic in nature, contemporary discourse about webblogs, whether scholarly or in mainstream media, tend to focus on adult and adult male blogs. Herring "conducted a gender- and age-focused content analysis of a random sample of 357 blogs collected from the largest available blog tracking site, blo.gs. The site tracks blogs hourly from four sources: antville.org, blogger.com,[1] pitas.com, and weblogs.com (the last of which itself draws from multiple sources)." This collection found that the blogs were divided roughly 50/50 between males and females, with adults (25+) and younger (both teens and "emerging adults) again breaking down at 50/50. The key differentiators come in with the breakdown of agegroups - significantly more male adults blog than female, while the opposite is true in younger individuals. Herring also notes that the blog styles show gender and age disparity, with adult males performing more of the "filter" style blogs of linking to newsworthy/mainstream media stories, while most younger bloggers, and most females, have personal "journal" style blogs. Herring's contention then, is that in focusing on the adult male blogs in scholarly research and media portrayals, we are perpetuating a dominant stereotype of male-centered opinions and importance within society, a society that continues to "embrace hierarchical values."
As someone who generally disagree's with the idea and practice of blogging (maddeningly, my wife is now suggesting I start my own), it was refreshing and intellectually stimulating to see the breadth of topics covered, a clear indicator of the wide-reaching social impact blogs will continue to have. In that vein, I enjoyed reading this material as published in "webblog" format vice the book, although interestingly, I still find that many of the patterns of "book" still impact how I read. For instance, I do not touch hyperlinks until I've read the entirety of the central (my view) narrative in linear progression, and after hyperlinking from the introduction, realized what part of my distaste for blogs is built upon (though relatively minor). The blogs I hyperlinked to, representative of many blogs, all tended to be excessively colorful, with clustered arrangements and distracting fonts, pictures or flash images, all of which take away from, rather than enhance my reading of the text (no, I am not arguing that a text is only hindered by images). Also, as I will get to in my reflection, Herring did not include sites such as LiveJournal into the discussion, considering them only precursors to the very "personal" blogs with which see then uses from Blogger.com and other sites. This is not an oversight of websites as much as it is a flaw in argument.
Although an interesting point, I have a hard time buying Herring's idea that because webblog discourse favors adult male blogs, that blogs are not inherently democratic. Why are we criticizing mass media for favoring the "filtered" blog style when reporting on certain stories. There are some realms, such as the political, where these filter styles are more appropriate. As sophomoric as it may sound, is it the adult male fault that most young and women want to have an online diary, and that socially, that online diary is not considered "newsworthy?" I will attempt to reenter the adult conversation in suggesting that it would be far more appropriate to address what outlets were covering what type of blog entry (filter/personal/combination) and even the why's of men writing filter's and women writing diaries, as means of promoting the democratizational abilities of webblogs. And further, in casually discarding online journals like Livejournal, as something less than the "personal blog," Herring and her co-authors are essentially perpetuating the serial hierarchy they seek to undue. Thus, in many ways, I liken the modern feminist argument presented here to those blood donation PSA's on today's radio, suggesting that by closing down a factory polluting drinking water, the individual is partly responsible for costing the jobs of hundreds in the town who know have no medical insurance to pay for health care - ranting, I know, but I think an important marker in the fight for democracy - explore the whole argument, and then approach rationally, as opposed to swinging for the fences on your first try.

Srr for March 20 --Into the Blogosphere and Tyler Curtain's "Promiscuous Fictions"

Becca Skinner

Dr. Kathleen Yancey

ENC5933-03

19 March 2007

Blogosphere SRR

This is an interactive ‘book’ with lots of clickable fringe and thoughtful savvy commentary about the whole big area of collaborative space and the new practices in publishing. The project is an ambitious overview of the “Blogosphere” and as such follows more than one pathway—this journal is more of an aerial map than a prescription. Not “First go straight, then turn and go uphill- pass three left-hand turns and take the fourth one to get to the museum—but more like “START HERE (or here) and go”.

I did go- feeling at times like poor Gretel all alone in the woods wishing birds won’t eat my breadcrumbs. I confess I printed out what I wanted to read first, made notes all over the pages and underlined like crazy- then I went back online and re-read, following links all over the place. I am both attracted and repelled by the online reading experience. I am made all too aware of the infomerse of unfathomable proportions through this clicking leaping linking process and made simultaneously to feel more smart (“Look Ma! No hands! Looky what I just found!”... and more dumb “Golly- this isn’t Kansas anymore, is it Toto? Are those flying monkeys? Is it getting dark and how far to OZ?”

The introduction makes a good case for weblog as artifact and sets up the dialog around aspects of blogworld like genre, public/private, identity formation and collaborative community. Some of the words I underlined are : self-publishing, overlap, hybrid, interaction, visual grammar, enclave-based discourse and re-articulate. I read the first paragraph of every chapter and chose to focus on Tyler Curtain’s entry “Promiscuous Fictions” because it really stood apart in terms of the aforementioned “visual grammar”, something which to me is a very potent piece of weblog potential.

Curtain deals with the queer-culture subset of blogs and draws analogies between the outsider status conferred by “queering” (“cultural artifacts that sometimes include and sometimes exclude representations of non-normative sexual and cultural subjectivities) and the “accretion and re-articulation without regard to proper boundaries” which describes the blogosphere itself. Blogs are in a sense “queer” and exist beyond what in the introduction is referred to as the “ traditional model of academic publishing”. Blogs are “promiscuous” as Curtain points out; they represent a “self-protective disregard of traditional notions of copyright and cultural power.”

Of course, as comfortable as it is to me to hold a paper in my hand and mark the hell out of it, offline there are no links. Reading again through Tyler Curtain’s chapter I clicked on all the links (some of which seemed to have expired or been disabled or had become defunct for lack of cyber-juice, or whatever techno-malady had overtaken them), as I had done when re-reading the introduction. I went to many fascinating places and (unfortunately) had-- was compelled to, it seems-- clicked on links within those, and then some more links inside of those links! again! until I had totally forgotten where I had come from or what I sought. It’s a linkiverse out there—one could start out like normal and never return. “I want to go home.” I thought--- much like coming to in a frame house upside down in the witch’s garden.

Like I said—smarter and dumber. The almost unbearable poignancy of realizing this worldwide conversation is going on every minute of everyday even while I sleep and every minute not spent sitting at my computer speaking and responding and participating and absorbing and seeking to know what exactly is going on everywhere about everything is an irretrievable moment of being in the flow that is swept away and gone and my chance to say the right thing at the right time with it, and I must be ever-vigilant and never stop- no! Not one minute ever cease from fingers on keys. Seeking learning finding out what the hell is going on with EVERYTHING everywhere! And we are both a “deep Web” and a “surface Web”, mere “nodes of information in the global information network”, and I am glad I have my garden to sit in and smell dirt and pull weeds and watch the way the lettuces grow in Fibonacci sequence and hate the wretched Fire ants. (Did Joyce prefigure the structure of internet discourse?)

The main thing I am left pondering is the fate of “Institutions” of learning and knowledge- as Curtain posits: “How is knowledge to be” (now, from henceforward) “produced out of the infinite archive? Where is the proper place of knowledge production? Is there a way of teaching, of passing it on? Universities have insisted on “universities” as the answer. This is in part what it means to professionalize, and certainly what it means to create bureaucracies to manage the production of knowledge... blogging shares with peer review an insistence that knowledge production is a communal effort. It is an effort that depends on and creates an audience, or as I will discuss shortly, a public.”