Anyway. First of all, we’ve got to address the question of what the term blog means. Is it a noun (a person’s blog, a blog post, a distinct genre, a mode, a format, a medium)? Is it a verb (to blog, an act, a practice, a process)? Is it both? I’d like to argue that it is both, following Danah Boyd’s injunction to scholars to “conceptualize blogging as a diverse set of practices that result in the production of diverse content on top of a medium that we call blogs.” Blogs can and do facilitate the production of many different genres. We’ve all seen blog posts that are essentially remediations of genres we are intimately familiar with from print: the personal essay, the news report, the academic argument (something this little blog text is looking like more and more!). Craig Saper notes that, in his correspondence with several academic bloggers, they often expressed a belief that blogging is merely one of a variety of legitimate options for writing and conducting research (of course, those are scholars who are already blogging, not the ones who are, at best disinterested in or, at worst, disdainful of, blogging). Thinking of them as a medium as Boyd suggests makes sense to me.
June 19, 2009
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June 19, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Well, good luck with that. How are you going to assess learning outcomes without some sort of product? How can a tenure and promotion committee evaluate process? We want finished products that are authorized!
June 19, 2009 at 4:46 pm
We’ll have to make more space for works-in-progress and that is what a blog really can be – a becoming-knowledge (I <3 Deleuze). The never-ending process of thought as a ubiquitous and visible presence. Unpolished, unauthorized, makeshift, and amateur. The blogger as, in Andrew Sullivan’s formulation, "a node among nodes" connected to the thoughts of others through a distributed network of links. A post-process composition that steps away "from a discourse of mastery and assertion toward a more dialogic, dynamic, open-ended, receptive, nonassertive stance" (Olsen 14).
June 19, 2009 at 4:46 pm
So no more blogging guidelines?
June 19, 2009 at 4:44 pm
Actually, I want to introduce more blogging guidelines! But only in order to problematize just how many and varied are the genres enabled by blog (medium and practice). Then, with a stronger understanding of genres and how they serve to create those like-minded groups (like academic disciplines, professional communities, the nihilistic ego chambers of the blogosphere that make Lovink anxious), I want to suggest we find ways outside of those boxes. Find ways to inhabit and make use of something that is ready-to-hand (note to self: Heidegger) in order to make it strange, tactically resist its conventionalization of our writing and thinking. Suggest that instead of writing good blogs, we write bad ones. Naughty ones (no, not in the porny way!). Blogs only an author could love, that no one else will ever read. Blogs that are a hash of rash ideas, heated arguments, notes, and unfinished musings. Only then might we see what we are really thinking.