More posts, more research resources

http://jenougher.wordpress.com/

blog research links

Here’s a list of the sources I have found useful so far, in considering the epistemology and ontology of blogging.  This is really just the preliminary part of my research project, figuring out in more than a surface way, what the hell blogging is, in a general sense.  I would like to steer my research in a more composition pedagogy-specific direction starting now.

http://jilltxt.net/

http://torillsin.blogspot.com/

(and if anyone is interested in GAMING, she has a gaming blog:

http://roomforresearch.blogspot.com/ )

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/biography/v024/24.1lejeune.html

ending at the beginning

Jill Walker Rettberg, a professor at the University of Bergen, uses her blog jill/txt to research how people tell stories online.   In her post “Rituals of Closure” Rettberg calls upon diary theorist Phillippe Lejeune, and his article “Why Do Diaries End?”:

“as Lejeune writes, the ending of a diary is far more fraught than its beginning: ‘What a contrast between the simplicity of a diary’s beginning and the evanescence of its ending: the multiple forms ending can take (stopping, destroying, indexing are all different, even opposite actions)’.”

But, what about the multiple forms beginning can take?  Clearly, diaries differ from other genres of writing, but I’m not so sure I agree that beginnings are less fraught than endings.  Students oftentimes say that their greatest difficulty in writing is just beginning.  I think that they say this because beginnings are fraught with possibility.  Beginnings bring with them the anxiety of having too much to say, or too little.  Or both, simultaneously.  To say something of consequence is no small feat.  To carve some semblance of meaning out of so many possibilities can be overwhelming.  Kierkegard said that “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”   While I don’t agree that freedom causes all anxieties, I do believe that the freedom, (or perhaps in our students’ case, the imperative) to say something of consequence can create a cognitive and creative bottleneck.

I am drawn to the idea of beginnings because I am a writing teacher who has to constantly begin classes, in which I must help many students begin many different writing projects.   A teacher’s business, especially a writing teacher’s, is to help students begin, to create the conditions for students’ beginnings.  Blogging seems like a  way to constantly begin, constantly evolve, not only for writing students, but also for a writing teacher.  This is my third blog post, and I am still revising  my purpose for blogging.  Revising my beginning.  Maybe this is an inherent aspect of blogging; what we write is contingent upon what we have already written, and there is a desire to push past that contingency, to say something new, something of consequence, to evolve that which we have already said.  I began my blog as a way to research blogging: what it is, why it is, how it is. But I know that if I am to persist in my blogging, I will have to constantly revise my purpose for it.  Or I will just stop.
Rettberg continues,

“Unlike paper diaries, blogs are intended to be read not only by our future selves but by others as we write. Does the presence of the actual reader (indicated by statcounters, links and comments) substitute for the presence of the future, or do we still create our blogs partly as little time capsules sent to ourselves? I wonder whether my main target audience might be myself? I reread my blog constantly, especially the most recent posts which are visible whenever I check on it, but also to find specific things I wrote about, or sometimes to see what I was thinking at a particular time.”
I would agree with Jill, that my target audience when I blog is, to a certain extent, myself.  But for me, this is due in part, at least in this beginning stage, to what Michael Wesch terms “Context Collapse”, in his Anthropological introduction to YouTube.   Although I am not in front of a webcam on my blog, I do feel as though I might be observed at any moment by almost anybody, really.   And that is unnerving.  For that reason, I do prefer to think of my future, and hopefully smarter, self as my target audience. Or maybe just my classmates, or just the authors whose work I am synthesizing into my blog posts.

Blogging sets up a sort of panoptic sensation, and it feels sort of vulnerable.  But I think that might be the point.  This sort of voluntary, Foucauldian self-monitoring that blogging sets the stage for, might necessitate another blog post entirely.

Keeping my imagined audience small, or non-existent, makes contributing to a body of knowledge on the web not quite so overwhelming.  Because contributing to this sea of information, setting yourself loose in the midst of it, can be even more overwhelming than trying to find what you want to inside of it.

Elvira and the meta-logue

I was reading the Charles Tryon article, “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition”, in which he states that he views blogging

“as a form of what Michael Renov (2004) describes as an “essayistic” mode conducive to engaging with the fragmentary or the ephemeral, precisely those aspects of everyday life that often escape careful analysis. The open-endedness of the essay form could also provide a way to talk about how blog writing, and the essayistic in general, is grounded in authors’ experiences”

I am very much interested in open-ended, essayistic writing, the type that Tryon describes here, in whatever form it takes. This set me about looking for more theory about blogging, to see if anyone else had anything to say about the open-ended inquiry style of blogging, but I didn’t find anything, really, except for one article, “Of a Divided Mind: Weblog Literacy”, by Torill Elvira Mortensen, in which she suggests that

“… the weblog may have its roots in the research journal, the ship’s log, the private diary, and the newspapers all at the same time…the weblog is nothing if not adaptive and unique…it is a bastard child of all personal writing, breeding wildly as it meets others of its ilk online…weblogs are, if anything, unfinished business…almost invariably, a blog will at some point contain metareflection. It often happens right at the beginning: ‘I want to write this weblog because…’ “

Even though she is not the true “mistress of the dark”, I was still really excited that her middle name is Elvira. I was also excited to find someone else discussing the ontology, if you will, of the weblog, that is, if a weblog can even have an ontological condition. Is a weblog alive??? Anyhow, she seems to be in agreement with Tryon, even though they didn’t cite one another. They both agree that blogging is pretty personal, and begins with an attempt to work on something, without needing a definite destination. Like a true essay (before the academy got a hold of it) the blog allows its writer to circumambulate, and to be overtly conscious of his or her self, and the role that particular self plays in the writing of said blog (or essay). Mortensen also suggests that

“In the spirit of the metalogue, the most common way to read and learn about research on weblogs is by reading weblogs and, preferably, by keeping one yourself. The nature of weblogs invites metalogues, and the research community keeps this metalogue running through a network of links , exchanges, comments, and notes between the weblogs of participants. The weblog itself is the best tool for researching and learning about weblogs.”

Okay Elvira. Makes sense, really. I definitely dig meta-ness, the idea of researching in a way that embodies the thing I am researching. Learn about blogging by blogging. Duh. You don’t learn how to dance by reading about dancing, though it may help out some. So, I am attempting to use my blog as a blogging research forum, but I don’t really expect anyone to ever comment on anything I write in it, since I don’t really know what I’m doing, really, just fishing around for other meta-bloggers at this point. If other meta-bloggers somehow find my blog and give me feedback, all the better.

Interogating Plato? or Socrates, or…?

“It will be obvious to anyone who reads these pages with perception that Plato is concerned to state and defend his own position in the matter of authorship. How could his writing of dialogues be of any value compared with the ‘living word’ of the master whom he por-” (Phaedrus, pg 162)

Although I’m not certain of who write this argument, or how it develops after this page, I would like to begin my post for this week’s readings with this broken excerpt from the end of the Phaedrus pages because it made me think of Paul Kameen, a professor of comp instructors (Like Kory), who wrote a book titled “Writing/Teaching”. In it, Kameen proposes, contrary to the traditional way of reading Plato dialogues, that teachers read the dialogues as though Socrates is not a direct mouthpiece for Plato, that there is a gap, some distance between Plato, the author, and Socrates, his principal character in the dialogues. This is more of a literary stance to take towards reading Plato, but a stance that creates an interesting space in which to read not only Socrates much more critically, but also to read Plato’s critics much more critically.

For example, when we adopt Kameen’s lens for reading Plato, what happens to our reading of Ong’s assertion that:

“One weakness in Plato’s position is that he put these misgivings about writing into writing…” ?

Or: “The technology of writing was not merely useful to Plato for broadcasting his critique of writing, but it also had been responsible for bringing the critique into existence.” ?

Or: “Although there was no way for Plato to be explicitly aware of the fact, his philosophically analytic thought, including his analysis of the effects of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was having on mental processes.” ?

Or: Plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the archaic preliterate world of thought and discourse.”?(pages 28-29)

Ong seems quite comfortable in his literate vs. oral snobbery, comfortable enough to assume that, since Plato was barely on this side of the cusp of a literate era, he could not really have been aware of what literacy was doing to his teacher’s, and his own thinking. That, to me, seems equivalent to saying that since cellphones, computers and facebook were all invented within (most of) our lifetimes, that we cannot really be all that aware of the effects that they are having on our consciousness(es). Ong seems to be saying that he and his contemporaries may more fully understand what it was like to be an ancient Greek than did the ancient Greeks themselves. I am not by any means discounting all of what Ong has to say, but I am a bit uncomfortable with his twenty-five-hundred-year-old backseat arrogance.

I wonder what we might (re)imagine Plato to have been saying about Socrates’ stance on writing, if we also imagine that Plato was fully aware of, comfortable with, and excited about the irony of putting his teacher Socrates’ misgivings about writing into writing. What kind of character, and teacher, does Socrates then become to us? I have not yet read the Reid and the Baron articles, but I’d like to hear from anyone who has, what those authors might be able to add to this discussion.