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).