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