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.”