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).