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January 26, 2005
Blogs and old school
To understand one dimension of blogs, I'm reminded of Peter Elbow’s work. Both the diary and the researcher’s notebook are forms of free writing, but a honing of self and knowledge, and almost calligraphic in the sense that they are penned in one stroke, so to speak, and typically added to rather than erased and revised. The diary is traditionally a stronghold of the expressivist self, but in free-writing and process pedagogy it found a counterpart in process and learning journals, cousins to researchers’ and artists’ notebooks, where the intellectual self engaged with public knowledge and experience and cooked up emergent ideas. This all took place privately in one’s own spiral-bound pages. On the other hand, the second pillar of Elbow’s program was the airing of ideas in the process of seeking feedback, but those giving feedback were often seen as a sort of focus group to help the writer/thinker/artist clarify thoughts and achieve better effects.
On the other side of the fence, I think of the social theorists who found the center of gravity of writing in the community rather than the self: theorists of discourse communities, genre studies, and so forth. This gang was concerned with the public forces that constrained writing in various ways and the pedagogies that arose were concerned with writers’ adapting to the conventions of the disciplines and the academy. They called for a more public voice. But for here, let's just say they're the community informing one’s writing and interjecting its purposes.
The character of the times in which both of these paradigms were working themselves out forced them to stand in opposition to one another.
What I’m struggling to get a grip on about blogs is that, here in the Age of Connectivity, they allow the two strains above—the private, process journal/research notebook and the oversight of the community—to merge in a strange place. (Is it a good place, or just the place technology allows?) Via the blog, the community is already present with, and audience to, ideas in their first notation, and the process journal can become dialogic in a critical way at the point of inception. It can become a publication even while it seeks to publish. Feedback would seem to move toward poly-authorship. Was there an importance to private contemplation in the spinning out of one’s ideas? What happens when an audience has already consumed, or even contributed to, material before it is fully elaborated? Does the need to elaborate fade? Will the future of a text depend on a difference between the blogging community and its "audience"? Or has this sort of process always been going on and is it the textuality and archival functions that blogs make possible that thicken the implications? I think of a finished text, for instance, containing citations of experts, but which are in fact feedback and responses to earlier blogged drafts of the text. Should “we allow ourselves to write half-thought, naked ideas and show them to others rather than saving them for fully fleshed out carefully thought through papers”(Mortenson and Walker)? Could this give rise to a sort of minute-rice or lightning chess form of scholarship? Or would that even be a bad thing?
Posted by hjjankie at January 26, 2005 04:35 AM