Blogtrax

The blog is porous. It’s like an organism. It lives, it changes, it grows. It takes nutrition from wider online/offline social worlds. Then it digests and transforms, releasing energy into new textual material, new links and interactions. It extends its tentacles, grows new ones, feeding off and feeding into relationships, knowledge systems, information, commodities. If it lives it can also get sick, tired, sleep or even die off altogether - be deleted, erased finally and forever - lost to the blogosphere. Gone blank.

The blog is more than a showcase of themes, or random interests. It gives me a space, albeit a limited one, to explore what I want to explore. I enjoy composing posts and I like writing. And in contrast, I often feel constrained by the writing games we have to play as academics. Constrained by the scope as well as the genres we write in …

is not to produce one new text, as in when you write on a word processor. Instead of producing a self contained text, you are adding a new patch to a huge patchwork. The links to other texts are not just journeys out but actually constitute the fabric of the post. So we are producing one huge, collaboratively written text. We are writing together and with an awareness of each other.
We also make it easy for others to join in, by referring back to previous posts and blogs we know (I think these links are anaphoric references for the Internet.)
Maybe that is why affinity spaces are so important to all members; we know we are all weaving the same fabric.
Hence, I was so shocked when this afternoon I saw that Guy had inadvertently linked to a post which had the most offensive pictures I have EVER seen. It felt like I was being insulted. It spolit my space.Guy have you seen it? I want to know what you think.

Lynda and Caroline
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

Here’s Lynda Graham (right) talking to Caroline at the Hidden Literacies conference. Whilst I was listening to Lynda I was making mental hyperlinks to blogs I read. What’s interesting is that the kids she studies have made journals into a ‘personal space for writing’…yet their friends and affinity groups are important for maintaining their interest. Also they develop themes…they have dead periods…they borrow ideas. OK, so blogging is a very different thing but it’s a close relative as a writing practice. I was sitting there thinking ‘Yeah, I know how those kids feel.’ Finally there’s a real sense of ownership. I LOVE MY BLOG! Truly, and I think I recall Joolz saying the same. I’m proud of it, it lives, I like it changing, updating and so on. It lives! I don’t ever think of it as a chore. I feel differently about this one (not quite the same sense of ownership/purpose), but the work is good, nevertheless. The style is different, it’s more reflective really and I suppose there’s an idea that it’s supposed to BE something. But I like it because it really is trying to do something new - to be research on its feet, working rebelliously outside the norms and stiffling discourses of straight-up-and-down academic writing.

Lynda and Caroline
Originally uploaded by edsghm.

Here’s Lynda Graham (right) talking to Caroline at the Hidden Literacies conference. Whilst I was listening to Lynda I was making mental hyperlinks to blogs I read. What’s interesting is that the kids she studies have made journals into a ‘personal space for writing’…yet their friends and affinity groups are important for maintaining their interest. Also they develop themes…they have dead periods…they borrow ideas. OK, so blogging is a very different thing but it’s a close relative as a writing practice. I was sitting there thinking ‘Yeah, I know how those kids feel.’ Finally there’s a real sense of ownership. I LOVE MY BLOG! Truly, and I think I recall Joolz saying the same. I’m proud of it, it lives, I like it changing, updating and so on. It lives! I don’t ever think of it as a chore. I feel differently about this one (not quite the same sense of ownership/purpose), but the work is good, nevertheless. The style is different, it’s more reflective really and I suppose there’s an idea that it’s supposed to BE something. But I like it because it really is trying to do something new - to be research on its feet, working rebelliously outside the norms and stiffling discourses of straight-up-and-down academic writing.

Just come across Weblog Kitchen which seems like a useful resource to this project. I also found Mortensen and Walker’s Blogonblog, but I’m not sure how regularly updated that is. And if you like the title to this post, that’s because I was tempted back to deCerteau by a visitor to Dr Joolz. In ‘The Capture of Speech’ he writes about new technology (actually the tape recorder, and that dates it), but the point he make has relevance to blogging - or some blogs, at least. It runs like this: ‘new technology […] does not necessarily break all links with the past , but can help to reactivate the memory of everyday life and reconstitute the narrative of daily practices and anonymous itineraries hidden in the thick folds of the social fabric…’ (p131). That makes me think of all those day-in-the-life type weblogs that are just about people doing ordinary stuff - like this one really.

But so many people who I know in meatspace are the most regular readers of my blog.
In some way I feel like it is cheating; I feel like I should only know them from cyberspace. And that my life should be a mystery and they should be wondering if I am who I say I am.

I know that people do take on new identities on the web, but I tell only things that are true … OK so I have backdated my blog twice, but that does not count … I think that for me, the point would be lost if I were not truthful on my blog. This may be because I wanted it to relate to my research; so I was in an earnest state of mind about it in the first place.
And another thing. Why do people I see often in meat space read my blog?
I think I know why.
One thing is, that I have asked members of my family to read it. Partly as a way of showing them a glimpse of my research which I don’t really say much about in detail in case they think its stupid. By saying, have you seen my blog? I am giving the chance to think my research is stupid without seeing their reaction.

I certainly would not talk the stuff I out on my blog; or in this way to people. It is actually a bit too self centred to put in a conversation. But too informal for a seminar or academic paper; it is unformed stuff. I give one sided views, I give no space for interruption. I can just blab on. It would be rude to, on a daily basis, barge out with stuff that I happen to want to talk about.

And so it is a different angle on me. They see a me that would not talk this stuff.
But also I spose they might feel they are seeing in to the real me. And also they can skim read it,or only read the first part and then click me out.

I love peole to comment though; so I do want feedback..

I have copied Guy on my emails and started writing “are you up to date on my blog? go to: http:/// etc”. And today one of the School of Ed secretaries said she had read it. I was a bit embarrassed and wondered what she thought. I don’t normally talk to her about that sort of stuff … I wondered if she thought I was batty.

I really do believe that heterotopia stuff about open and closed spaces and public/private sharing the same space.

The other thing, is that whole discipline thing of trying to write everyday. First the physical thing is sometmes hard, getting to the pc. Or maybe you are too busy and have to squeeze in time from nowhere.

But even if that goes OK, you have not got anything o talk about, so have to hunt around like a journalist.

So this blogging thing, is a very unique thing for me. And I really like what it is doing to me.

I feel I need the visuals too on my blog. Sunday 23rd I just blogged the same old cryptic, elliptical crap but then I felt I needed something to brighten my page, so I took a really dull picture of the Forge city-living site! That was strange ‘cos today I really wanted the RFID thing. Anyway, that now puts me well in this methodological murk. As soon as you look at something as a material scientist/social scientist or whatever, it changes. I know that. But living it is different. That autoeth is strong medicine! The first scrape of the archaeologist’s trowell leaves a mark in time, and that too becomes the archaeology…I look closely and everything changes. Is there a desire to return to more innocent blogging? I sense there’s no return. In ‘Being John Malkovitch’ there’s that bit where there’s a puppet-puppeteer -it’s a bit like that- I guess this is the heat of self-reflection.

Is that what we have been trying to be in all the time?
Are we doing our own big brother?
Do we tell people all the things we want them to know we have been thinking about?
Are we living some kind of pseudo academic, pseudo life on line?
Is my blog an online Academic big broother? Am I trying to be a celebrity?

I am serious.

I am still really enjoying the DrJoolz thing and love that you love my visuals Guy. I love the comments - especially seeing people who I don’t really know appear on my site - even if I only see them via the droppings left on my meter. I get a real buzz.

Today I did a thing with some of the images I have collected over the last few years and wondered if they would make an article actually … the writing was realy helping me to think things through…. although it is still in very embryonic form . So the blog also has this function which helps me in my work - which is of course mangled up with, entrenched in, embeded in, my life generally.

The thing we as teachers have done for years is talked about the importance of audience for kids’ writing. And at last I am really finding out what that means. So that is really a great thing, to write and have responses.

But I am also utterly convinced that the notion of space is really important to think about. I ove going to my blog and I love being here. Although I increasingly feel the absence of Colin and Michele who I thought would be playmates … I find myself continually checking and feeling sad that they are stuck on 22nd December.

And as a reader, it is a different sensation, going on line, to say seeing those autobiographical shorts on Channel 4 for example. There you see snippets of people’s lives, often thematic, often including extracts from other bits of film …

The interactivity of online is really important, but more meaningful and less confined than interacting with a Sky remote control.

You read blogs and sometimes they’re riddled with links - like a Swiss cheese. Today, on mine, I got pretty linky. Mostly I think I build around the links, assuming readers will take a fairly linear reading path (ref Kress) but that’s not what I do when I read other blogs. I think I choose the link that looks most interesting, or maybe hover over a link to check the URL. Photoblogs and the more visual variety seem to me to be much more on the screen in an immediate way, almost as if they work on a different logic. Linky blogs reach out, string together or even juxtapose stuff on other sites. That’s not to say one’s better than another - just different. In the same way you get the ‘today I met up with my friends’ style, again following a different logic. A colleague’s daughter is going to Oz for a while and she’s looking at setting up a photoblog that, presumably, charts her travels and keeps the family back home ‘in the picture’.

The site meter makes me nervous. I don’t like noticing that I visit Blogtrax repeatedly, neurotically, obsessively - so when I want scholar google (which I don’t have bookmarked) I don’t go to Blogtrax, where I know there’s a link, instead I google ‘scholargoogle‘ and then AAARGH! halfway down the page there is Blogtrax! OMG!!!! I’m in a hall of mirrors. It gets worse. My blog seems to be blurring with Blogtrax. On Saturday I blogged the same picture on both; today I posted on my blog something that referred to work on this blog. Blogtrax is infecting my blog like a virus. Soon I’ll need therapy.
I take comfort in Annette Markham, she sounds so nice. But at the same time you get the sense that she’s been to that same scary place. Reflecting on her own ethnography she says: ‘Every action I made that influenced the project became a text that engaged and interacted with a multiplicity of other texts. In the process of organising and doing this study, I was taking part in the organisation of that which was to be the study….In the end, this is a study of a place I helped to create.’ (p.18) ….and then as if that was not enough she has the brass neck to interupt herself. How cool is that? She is my new hero.