Class Discussion 9/28/05

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.

Negotiating "School" and "Informal" Discourse

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:

• Risk of alienating regular readers—after all, readers attracted
  to the focus and style of a personal blog might be bored or put off by
  the more formal assignments that will be incorporated into students' daily
  blogs (e.g., an analysis of a blog subgenre, a blog review essay). One member
  of the class pointed out that some sites provide options for controlling
  who can read individual posts: everyone, account-holders in a particular
  service, subscribers to a particular blog, or particular individuals.


• Double work load—if someone is already blogging regularly, they would like to be able to incorporate
  some of that ongoing work in their class blog.

Motivation

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
:-):

• Keeping in contact at a distance. As always, we asked what difference
  this particular medium makes, since one can keep in contact at a distance
  via phone and regular mail. A blog provides an asynchronous means of "catching
  up" with busy friends and, especially if it is kept up regularly, provides
  a more up-to-date, more detailed, more "fine-grained" account of everyday
  life than phone calls and mail at longer intervals might.


• Aide de memoire


• Finding interest in everyday events


• Dealing with newness and change through reflection and writing


• Living vicariously (or, from the writer's point of view, living openly).
  This point raised concerns about the negative connotations of terms used
  in the Miller and Shepherd articles—voyeurism and exhibitionism. We wondered
  if alternative terms/phrases might reveal other dimensions of our interest
  in other lives. Could we articulate a need to understand what others' lives
  are like?


• Break down barriers to personal communication (blogging may be "easier
  than face face" communictions for meeting new people.


• Safe place to think through events and receive real-time feedback, reality checks


• Running the world through a personal/professional
  filter and sharing that view with others (the difference that media
  makes here is the variety and number of personal filters available online,
  especially for widely discussed events).

Antecedent Genres

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.

• Journal - shares a focus on "what's happening to me"


• Notes and queries - sharing and searching for bits of information relevant
  to ongoing research


• Editorial - but without the "guardedness/accountability" associated with
  writing under the auspices of an institutional sponsor


• Conference papers - floating an idea


• Travel review/guide - recommendations (the blog provides lots of personal
  perspectives, especially local perspectives, as well as multimedia). We noted
  questions about reliability of information but recognized that such questions
  arise for all media.

Kairos

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:

• Court TV and media coverage of high-profile trials


• Technology in general (the Clipper chip and other encryption/privacy debates)


• Cell phones (overheard conversations, illicit pictures)


• The Web in general,Web cams in particular

On the Candidates' Blogs, Writing Right and Wrong - New York Times

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>

At one point in this article, which covers a dust-up about inaccuracies in an entry in a campaign blog ascribed to the candidate but actually written by an aide, the reporter writes,

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."

Ms. Bluestein might have said, "this happens in political campaigns all the time in all media." Heck, even when the candidate is speaking in person, he or she is often not speaking his or her own words and may not know whether they are accurate. Why should anyone assume that blogs would be different in this respect? I think this story tells us more about the newsworthiness of blogs than about the nature of blogs.

Miller and Shepherd on Genre and the Blog

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>.

There is so much here that one at first wonders where to start and what to pick out as "ideas to think with" (our purpose isn't to memorize any of this stuff; the test of a good article, for our purposes, is whether it provides any ideas or "conceptual tools" that we can use in analyzing or composing blogs). I would argue that the article may be summarized, albeit reductively, by three statements:

• Genres develop at least in part from antecedent genres
• Genres exhibit "stability-enough"
• Genres undergo constant change

I've tried to represent some of the complexity—and the useful "ideas to think with"—underlying those deceptively simply arguments in Miller and Shepherd's article in this diagram (sorry about the visual complexity; I am trying to represent a rich argument).

Blogging: A new source of spam!

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, Nichols, and Priebe on Weblogs

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).