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In the fall, my students and I will be studying blogs and their historical analogues: journals, diaries, commonplace books, daybooks, and so on. In preparation, I am thinking about some basic questions: What is a blog, ca. 2005? How widely can blogs vary and still be blogs?
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In response to our readings for today (Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe, "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs"; and Miller and Shepherd, "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog") we had a far-reaching and productive discussion on (1) negotiating "academic" and "intrinsic" expectations for blogs written in the context of academic classes, (2) what motivates us to blog, (3) the "antecedent genres" that inform some types of blogs, and (4) the cultural phenomena that seem to share blogging's (re)negotiation of the relationship between public and private life.
Students in the class have the option of creating a new blog for the duration of the course or incorporating their assignments into their ongoing blogs. We talked a bit about the issues that regular bloggers took into consideration before deciding to incorporate "school" discourse into their blogs. Two issues came up:
Following up on Brooks, Nichols, and Priebe's research on students' motivation
to post to their class blogs, class members brainstormed reasons that they
are motivated to post to their blogs (not necessarily their "academic" blogs
:-):
We tried to add to the list of antecedent genres noted by Miller and Shepherd
or to articulate the pragmatic purpose of genres they mentioned.
Finally, we added to Miller and Shepherd's list of cultural phenomena that,
in ways similar to the blog, (re)negotiatiated the relationship between public
and private space in the 1990s:
Healy, Patrick D. "On the Candidates' Blogs, Writing Right and Wrong - New York Times." 28 Sept. 2005. New York Times. 28 Sep. 2005 <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/28/nyregion/metrocampaigns/28blog.html>
Asked why Mr. Ferrer was credited for words he did not write, Ms. Bluestein offered an everyone-does-it defense.
"This happens in political campaigns all the time," she said. "In this case he called in some ideas, and someone got a little loose with the editing."
Miller, Carolyn, and Dawn Shepherd. "Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog." Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 27 Sep. 2005 <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/blogging_as_social_action_a_genre_analysis_of_the_weblog.html>.
Well, spam appears to be one aspect of the blogosphere evolving rapidly. First, other "bloggers" in your service commandeer your comments to advertise commercial Web sites. Then you start getting e-mail posted to your blog -- more ads. Oh well, as I tell people who gripe about e-mail spam, they should just look at their snail-mail box. Why did we think that the Internet would be any different?
Brooks, Kevin, Cindy Nichols, and Sybil Priebe. "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs." Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs. Ed. Laura J. Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman. June 2004. 27 Sep. 2005 <http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/remediation_genre.html>.
Much of the survey data reported in this article won't be important my class's exploration of the blog, but the discussion of genre and remediation contains some useful nuggets for our course. First, though, a couple of reservations. While the authors acknowledge the notion of "dynamic and evolving" genres established in the work of folks like Carolyn Miller, Charles Bazerman, and Richard Coe, the treatment of genre in the article seems relatively narrow and static. The authors point to three print genres (the journal, notebook, and note card) that they believe are being remediated by the Weblog into blogs (containing short, frequent entries), notebooks ("longer pieces of focused content"), and filters (lists of links accompanied by short comments). That choice was presumably dictated by their research study and pedagogical context, but the consequences for their argument shouldn't be overlooked. In particular, they offered their students "explicit definitions of journal, notebook, and filter weblogging"—a pragmatic decision, perhpas, but one that precludes an open-ended investigation of the blog as an emerging, dynamic constellation of genres. Second the author's treatment of remediation focuses on only the wayys in which new media "repurpose" the features of antecedent media, while Bolter and Grusin's account of remediation recognizes reciprocal influences between old and new media (e.g., when TV news screens adapt elements of Web design or print uses conventions of e-mail and chat rooms such as smileys).
That said, the study's focus—motivation—provides a rich topic for discussion. For instance, how do various elements of the blog—public display, multi-modal composing, the expectation of regular writing, and the possibility of comments from readers—affect our motivation to write?
In addition, the authors draw attention, almost in passing, to the fact we can study the particular composing devices employed in blogs in order
to understand blogs as rhetorical acts. They note "summary, paraphrases, and the development of voice," but one could greatly extend the list of formal devices (e.g., narration, quotation, enumeration or listing, and so on) and rhetorical actions (e.g., promising, defending, hedging, complaining, ranting, and so on). Indeed, an exploratory approach to these formal and rhetorical elements could help provide a more fine-grained analysis of genre by showing how, in practice, shared purposes emerge in the blogosphere and are enacted through a more or less shared constellation of rhetorical practices (e.g., Web diaries tell first-person and third-person stories).
As someone with professional and personal interests in both print and digital media, I am always curious about how new media and genres build upon earlier forms and technologies. To help me think about historical analogues to the blog, I've been asking my colleagues about earlier genres that share characteristics with the blog. First, though, I had to list characteristics of the blog that could be considered separately from its connection to the Web, at least for the purposes of analysis. Here's what I came up with (allowing for the fact that any description of a genre amounts to a stereotype that won't do full justice to the complexity of any form of human expression):