Blogtrax

Writing about the Theatre of the Oppressed and the fictional account of the Pandorama in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (here) calls to mind the power of representation in mediating and reflecting upon identity. It seems to me that representing oneself, telling one’s own story, creates the conditions for reflexivity. This is the sort of project we began here, on Blogtrax, part of which is now published in our study of academic blogging. Now of course, the two examples I begun with are products of an emancipatory discourse, being strategies for breaking the silence of oppressive conditions. Blogging as such, is too general, too diffuse a medium for that, but nevertheless one can still find good examples of blogs that provide that sort of counter-narrative, and to some extent some of the much-hyped ‘citizen journalism’ performs that function - but in a more general sense what I’m moving to is a sense of the power of digital literacy and a particular role that blogs can perform.

Not that we would want to confer blogs with some sort of universal power to create reflexive awareness of identity any more than we would subscribe to those ideologies about the power of literacy to transform cognitive processes. But still it strikes me that once we begin to make conscious decisions about representing ourselves, and once we begin to reflect on that process - particularly in dialogue with others - in terms of what is allowed, what is included and what is bracketed, we can develop clearer insights into the whole process of identity performance. And because blogs tend to the personal (my online home; the cubby hole; wunderkammer or whatever), identity performance through topic choice, hyperlinking and blogroll allegiances becomes more salient and more open to scrutiny.

It’s very interesting to try to trace changing perceptions of the blogging phenomenon. Although some commentators are suggesting that interest in blogging is beginning to dwindle (or reach a steady state) and that most blogs have a relatively brief shelf-life, they have at the same time begun to attract more attention. Traditional media sources regularly comment on blogging - often snarling at any suggestion of citizen journalism - and stories about blogging incidents are certainly newsworthy. Most recently the threatening comments story attracted interest and the proposed ‘code of conduct’ provoked hot debate. But this was frequently turned on us, the blogging community, who were perceived as self-interested, narcissistic or simply irrelevant. I actually felt quite insulted by the ‘why would anybody want to blog’ tack taken by some traditional journalists. Why would anybody write? Why would anybody want to express themselves? Why would anyone want to experiment with new tools of communication? Why shouldn’t people remain passive and silent… need I say more? The so what argument is very irritating- and I don’t think that’s just a defensive reaction.

However, when blogger friends slow up in their posting and presumably in their enthusiasm, I suppose you do stop and think. But then I’m aware of how they only represent a small segment of the writing/reading blog culture, and so the blogging goes on. Interestingly, I was at a meeting of academics last month, when someone suggested that a new initiative required a blog. The ‘groan’ reaction was interesting - but I wasn’t quite clear whether it was a groan of reluctance (we’ve been here before), a groan of overload (not more reading/writing), or a groan that suggested that somehow the blogging format was now passe.

In an interesting contrast to this, as I begin to introduce blogging to students, there is more interest. It’s as if something exotic has now been tamed. And of course it has been in VLEs. Here blogging is behind bars. But I’m quite positive about that, because I’ve noticed that as students and teachers become more habituated to the blog (and wiki) tools - we use them in the Blackboard environment - they begin to understand the purposes and principles a bit better. And, at the same time, they begin to understand the limitations in terms of audience and functionality. I’m still quite content to blog away! Sometimes I have more to say than others; sometimes my postings are lightweight, sometimes they atempt to record ideas or trends that are significant (at least to me). A lot of the time, now it feels more like building up an archive and Blogger’s introduction of tags certainly helps to create this sort of mindset.

I still feel proud of my blog and rarely look back at postings and think ‘I wish I hadn’t said that’ - I don’t tend to edit posts after publishing except to mend a broken link or when there’ s a mistake that makes things unclear. The most personal side of my blog is my use of images. I’m not a photographer, but I like to have a visual element. What I really enjoy is the juxtaposition. Sometimes my Flickr image will have absolutely nothing to do with the written text, other times it will have a meaning to me (and maybe one or two others) - and at other times it will pun or simply illustrate the post.

Here’s another identity quote I like.

‘We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.’ Hustvedt, 2003: 120

It just says that old Giddens thing again but in a different way. I thought I’d add it in here!

I got an email allegedly from Blogsome telling me the passwrod had changed for this site.

What a fib!!

Guy suggested that it was probably a hacker and he was right … so I wonder why people do that kind of thing? I t must take ages to work out how to get a programme to tell email adresses from blogs; then the p person has to think ofg the great idea to put in the email … e.g. ‘your passwrod has now changed’.. and then execvute the idea.

Why?? I don’t get it.

I’ve just finished reading Siri Hustvedt’s novel ‘The Blindlfold’. Not surprisingly it’s all about identity and identity shifts, dislocation etc etc. But there’s one part that really stands out for me. The main character has just assumed an identity which involves adopting another name - a fictionalised identity. One of this character’s confidantes claims that ‘Fiction is not like life.’ - fair enough - but the response is brilliant, I’m sure I’ll use it as a quote sometime:

You know as well as I do that the line can’t be drawn, that we’re infected at every moment by fictions of all kinds, that it’s inescapable.

So I’m now pre-occupied by that phrase ‘ infected at every moment by fictions’. Of course the suggestion of disease or infection seems to carry a value judgement, but the nonetheless it also makes us see how the fictions we consume and the fictions we live by influence our self-narrative. Perhaps also the most severe forms of political oppression are achieved by innoculating the populace with dangerous fictions.

I’ve noticed a number of academic contacts slowing-up on their posting frequency and I don’t think it’s just a seasonal thing. Maybe we’ve passed the first flush of blogging - saying this, I’m really thinking about a fairly limited group of academic bloggers in the UK . Elsewhere in the blogosphere, people come and go, change service and so on. That seems like a natural rhythm.

Although posting is sometimes a bit of a chore, it’s become a real habit for me and there’s no shortage of stuff to put up there. So I can’t really see slowing-up myself at this point in time. Recently, my posting has been much more focused on digital literacy and from time to time I’ve found myself commenting on education which is a bit of a new departure for me.

I have my blog set as my home page, and therefore tend to look at it regularly. I use the sidebar links a lot, particularly while I’m working. So it’s identity performance, regular updating and a handy bookmark all at the same time. I do most of my blog reading at home. My patterns vary a bit, but I check my favourite blogs every couple of days, others every week or so. At the moment I’m not using any feeds, because Snap gives me a quick page view which does just as well.

Usually when I’m writing (and reading more) there are more links to papers and stuff. Other times the posts are like observations, proto-thoughts or field notes. Currently blogging is quite a quick process - maybe 10 mins or so, but every so often I have the need (or interest) to build up my photo-stock on Flickr….so that can add to the length of time involved.

I don’t spend a lot of time tinkering with the look of my blog, although I do wish it looked a bit less busy (like the Critical Literacies one). The last thing I did was add Snap - then before that I just wasted about half an hour one night working out how to put a space in between my photo and the blog title (how sad is that?). The other thing I do on a regular basis, as it happens, is update my reading/listening bit through 43 things. That’s very personal - I love doing that - but I don’t thing anyone else cares at all. No-one’s ever commented on that on the blog or face2face!!

Well it’s a good while since I blogged here, and given the avowed intention of keeping Blogtrax alive as a log of an ungoing autoethnography it does seem to be limping along and that’s largely a matter of time - having the time to keep up a reflective blog whilst posting on my personal blog, shared blogs, student blogs and, of course, reading favourites and new ones gobbles up the time. Put that together with life (and explorations of new social networking sites) it all adds up to a convincing excuse.

My personal blog is now 3 years old - that seems significant in itself - and I’ve been wanting to reflect on that for a week or so. In 3 years I have just over 500 posts - that works out at roughly one every other day on average, but given that I was away 3 months and often stop when I’m abroad, my ‘normal’ frequency is higher than that. OK so that’s a bit boring, but one thing that it shows is that its a pretty regular part of what I do - part of my life. Mostly, I just like doing it and enjoy the exercise of thinking about something that’s interesting and then writing it up. I like watching it grow as an unbounded, cumulative text.

It’s hard to tell how my posts change over time, but it seems they’re nearly all to do with technology, writing and teaching and how these things intersect with my personal and professional life. I think I tend to add in local colour about what I’m up to, what my family’s doing and then add the occasional comment about current affairs - but these provide background detail. I use my sidebar to show reading and music, but my comments on these are minimal. My sidebar is a mess, but it’s one of the most useful bits for me. Since my blog is set as my homepage, it’s got some of the most important links for me.

I’m interested in how I use my blog for different purposes. A common one is when people email about research stuff (eg I read so and so, is there any more?). It’s dead easy just to say, check the links on my blog…but also when friends or students hear about Ruth’s singing - I can’t remember any details, but I can say ‘Look for Ruth on the sidebar.’ I’m sure there’s much more like this but these examples really blow a whole in that idea that a blog is an online journal. I mean who’s journal has that kind of functionality?

Most of the time I love my blog. I like its distinctive, quirky look and I like it when people unexpectedly stumble on it. It’s good the way people pick up on different things ‘Oh I saw my picture!’ or ‘I liked the bit you wrote about’, ‘I don’t get it’ or ‘I liked that picture of the steam engine.’ - whatever. Sometimes I’ve got too much to say and these days I just try to keep it to a paragraph; sometimes what I’ve got is a collection of completely unrelated things; sometimes I can’t think of anything to write. Sometimes I hate my blog. I hate it most when I don’t feel I have anything to say, when I’m tired but still in the trall of that blog addiction.

But when I look back at my posts (with the possible exception of the very early ones which I thought were secret) I feel good about them. If there’s humour I don’t really care if no-one else laughs. If there’s insight, I don’t care if there are no comments. Sometimes I get the feeling that some readers might find what I’ve written pretentious but I don’t care because that’s what was on my mind. I often read the whole screen of my blog, and I nearly always think ‘Yes….good’. I hardly ever regret posting something.

Last, and really a rather funny thing that’s worthy of comment is my fear of transferring to the new blogger format. Funny because I’ve been raving for ages about getting category tags on Blogger…and now they’re here…BUT that means transferring my blog with the possibility that some of the add-ons and its particular look may shift. Will I be old-skool for ever? Probably not, but I’ve recognised that I may need time when I make that leap and so far I haven’t had it!

(Not really a postscript but another bit after ‘last’). In my teaching I’ve been looking at the blog as a reflective tool…now I’m beginning to see that everywhere. Of course you couldn’t say that it’s part of the blog architecture, blogging is no more or less reflective than any other kind of writing but composing your thoughts for your ideal reader is certainly a common blog genre - long may it thrive!

I started taking pictures of padlocks. As a matter of fact I copied the idea from someone else. Here’s a short exchange on my photostream

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Nice shot, I’m glad I’m not the only one who takes pictures of padlocks!

on-the-run Pro User says:
Actually it’s contagious. I thought your’s were so good that I suddenly found myself copying!!

lizjones112 Pro User says:
Thank you, glad to know I can inspire others to take interesting pictures

I wrote about this on my own blog, referring to visual memes, but all the time I was thinking about copying and the whole ambiguity of that culturally located concept of copying. I guess we are first socialised into the complexities and nuances of copying in school. We learn for example that:

- close imitation is good in certain contexts (such as letter formation, lining up, singing, turning somersaults, using technical vocabulary)

- imitation is bad, when we make fun of how people walk, speak and so on…that is as long as they are not legitimate targets (and of course what constitutes a legitimate target varies from situation to situation)

- imitation is good in creative tasks, particularly in the broad sweep of things such as kinds of representation, writing genres and so on

- imitation is bad in creative tasks when it shows a lack of originality and when it is a straightforward (literal) copy

In a nutshell, we learn by copying and we learn not to copy. Our academic life is shot through with similar notions about copying. Plagiarism is bad, summarising someone else’s ideas and acknowledging them is good. Doing a similar thing to someone else locates you in a particular discipline or field. Doing exactly the same thing is unoriginal etc etc. Underlying all this there seem to be some cultural constructs about individuality, originality, authority and authorship that are related to the way that knowledge and learning are conceived of and policed in the dominant Western paradigm. These are all concepts that new media and new technologies challenge. Yet, we still prize the originality of our blogs even if we riff off the posts of others; we celebrate the uniqueness of the images in our photostream even when we are inspired by others. Cut/paste, capture/remix, and rip/burn technologies suggest how we can make new knowledge or art out of the work of others. Originality and creativity is perhaps re-defined in terms of the juxtapositions we make, the new links we establish. What we do then is less like orchestrating new comments more like deejaying, seguing one idea track into another whilst still keeping our audience on the dance floor. Maybe copies our OK (after all they serve DJs well), we are distinctive in the versions we have and the combinations and sequences we make and, of course, the spaces in which we produce them. After all that’s where we perform our identity and develop our reputation.

I like the whole idea of voice and have a feeling that this could be a distinctive feature of the written aspect of blogging. I say voice, but I really mean voices - in a sort of Bakhtinian way. I don’t have any strong theoretical reference points for the concept of voice, and I’m even uncertain how that really differs from style, but it seems to make sense that to the extent that blogs are keeping going the narrative of the self they almost inevitably have those linguistic traces that constitute voice.

What made me think this was reading a comment from Dr Joolz on my blog which went

Your blog is very newsy lately. You are so good at keeping uptodate and I am trying to copy.

And that sounded a bit like Julia, but also a bit like Julia pretending to be Kate. Now pinning that down is difficult and could also be WRONG, but I do get a real sense of voice in the comment. It’s also interesting that because of the power relations in blogging (you are, when you leave a comment, simply adding to what the owner of the blog has said, creating a sort of footnote, after all) most people tend to move towards a more informal speech-like register - moving in the direction of chat. Pehaps in chat, or at least in the way we write when we want to sound chatty, we get a bit closer to the distinctiveness of voice. It would be interesting just to focus on the linguistic features of people’s comments….

OAAghh, I keep on saying

I use the terms ‘anchored’ and ‘transient identity’ to distinguish between positions which are profoundly influenced by a long history of socio-cultural practices (such as gender or religion) and those which are more easily made, re-made and un-made (such as affinity groups or fandom). These are not simple binary divisions, but poles on a continuum. We suggest that interactions, contexts and events are likely to make certain aspects of identity more or less salient at any given time and in any particular social interaction. Examples of anchored identities are: gender, position in family, religion, age, social class and geographical location. They relate to aspects of children’s lives over which they have little control and are least likely to change. On the other hand, transient identities change over time, being influenced by maturation, changing cultural conditions and peer group affiliations. These identities are defined in relation to media narratives, popular music, sport, commercial toys, video games, and iconic objects.

But after a few outings and plenty of discussion there’s some things to qualify, change and adapt. First these are not binaries…in fact, it’s often the case that anchored identities are traced through transient identities (eg: gendered artefacts; iconic figures who are salient for particular social groups). So a particular expression of fandom is played out against the backcloth of wider social forces. In a sense, and at least for a time these identities are braided together. But the distinction remains important simply because we exercise choice over our transient identities. We can choose or refuse to choose an identity as a football supporter of a particular team. In fact football works quite well as an example. Personal histories, the geography of residence, and sometimes social class -although admittedly less so nowadays - and maybe gender as well, influence the expression of our allegiance to a particular club. In some regions there is a religious texture in there, too (Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow, for example), but although we may profess to support ’till death’, a change of fortunes can quickly lead to changes in our sense of ourself as a supporter.

It’s a very different picture with anchored identities. Changing or concealing the biological or factual indices of who we are is far more challenging. It is overtly transgressive, often having deep-rooted consequences - and even raises legal issues. But, of course, some choice still operates; and that is the choice of how much we emphasise or perform that particular identity. And this, in turn, is relevant to our sense of ourselves, our self-presentation, and our acts of impression formation in an era in which actively creating the story of ourselves has come to the fore. Perhaps we need a deeper understanding of the nuances of identity performance in the shifting social networks of our lives and a more sophisticated appreciation of how we orientate ourselves to artefacts and narratives in this process. We perform, after all, to an audience and in a particular context. And so the particular figured world is a significant influence as we draw on a repertoire of behaviours and semiotic devices to communicate this sense of self.