Blogtrax

We’ve created some bigger categories for this autoethnography and this has involved creating clusters of tags from our existing coding of Blogtrax postings. This is a leap forward. Since our last F2F, I’ve slightly reworded them. I expect they’ll change again. But currently they work like this.

1. Publishing the self which includes specific issues about performing online identities, our sensitivies as bloggers to impression formation and our decisions about what to post and what not to post. In considering the content of our blogs, we look at how postings can work on the boundaries between private and public life. We also include the affective dimension of blogging in this category (such as feelings of pride, embarrassment and so on) and their relationship to respect and reputation in blogging communities.

2. The nature of the text as an interlinked and constantly evolving work, that is fluid, visual and, at least in part, created by readers, other bloggers and the comments that are added. Here we consider the idea of the blog as a visual display (how do I look?) and develop the idea of blogs as a three-dimensional patchwork.

3. The fabric of the text is concerned with the tools used to construct meaning. Predominantly this is a about the use of written language to signify group membership, reference to shared understandings and humour. However, we are also keen to show how visual and audio modes are used – and in this case, in particular, the use of photographic images. Here we include the use of add-ons such as side-bar links, site meters and feeds. (Flickr albums?)

4. Social networks looks at how interactivity gives rise to the notion of blogging as a shared endeavour, a network than can lead to the development of a community of practice or an affinity space and how this relates to other platforms for online interaction (email, Flickr, MSN, shared blogs, others’ blogs) as well as to offline interaction.

So that’s the beginning of the middle, the middle of the beginning, or just another posting, depending on how you want to read it!

The Blogtrax enterprise speeds along its timeline towards the Inside Out paper and the Miami destination. Destination or station? It seems more like a journey or a duration than anything else. In some sense Blogtrax was complete at its inception, as good a part of the process of turning inside out as any. Blogging seems to work in an inside-out-sort-of-way. Face to face we may begin with academic/professional persona (maybe later on some personal stuff floats in); in blogging we start with ourselves (or the MilkTray version) then bring the academic/professional in from time to time. Maybe.

inventive and ephemeral media need to be sustained (…..) that are sites of experimentation for practices of writing and linguistic performance; for language, both written and spoken, is everyone’s commodity, the site par excellence of anonymous practices of creation and circulation, in which culture, and thus a freedom, is crystallized and concretized. (deCerteau, 1997:128)

Our edited, reviewed, revised and published texts begin and end, are complete and bounded despite the fact that we claim they are part of an ongoing conversation, but our postings are much more spontaneous, even at times inchoate, rambling, half-connected and never complete. Perhaps at best they are insider stories. They turn inside out - and this autoethnographic process does this, too. The inner workings of jottings, musings, impressionistic thoughts and emotions go down, go public prior to substantial reworking. And as they go along they collect and discard readers, comments, and other links. Later postings begin to allow new readings of old ones and what seemed like a well-worn track along which the research process progresses becomes one path among many.

Still, there’s analysis, and summation, writing up and the whole tricky business of presentation. The part where you start to lose depth by attempting to achieve coherence. We have to learn to handle complexity and turn that multidimensional patchwork of bloglives into something else, something more conventional and bounded. But, really, to be faithful to the enterprise, even the early drafts of paragraphs and fragments and bits that will eventually be hidden or deleted are potential postings on Blogtrax. Another avenue for publication, capturing the process on the move as far as one ever can.

I’m currently involved in an interesting little skirmish with my university over whether or not to include my blog address on my ‘business card’. Strategic? Nope. I was downright sneaky. Here’s how it goes. You have to fill in a form (surprised? No, OK). I did. But, I didn’t put the blog address on then, though. I bided my time and then intercepted the process at the pre-print stage - a separate department, naturally. That’s when I said, casually: ” Oh, by the way, I’d like this on too.’ No problem. No problem, initially that is.

Then they got back to me. “I think we’d better have your work URL as well.” Of course, I conceded thinking the matter was settled. A little later on I got an email explaining that if they put both web addresses on “it would get a bit squashed”. OK, fine. Fine by me, let it be a bit squashed.

Now, today, somebody senior (a man) who’s in ‘marketing’ wants to talk to me about this blog thing. Do I cross the border into open conflict? No, not just yet. I sent the man the shortest of emails “Is there a problem?”. No reply yet. But, is there a problem? Might I get the sack or draw the university into ill-repute (never mind the fact that they’re already forking out money to fly me to Miami to talk about blogging)?

Then I start to wonder if this blogging lark - you know, the stuff that gets talked about on Woman’s Hour - really is subversive. What are they afraid of? Loss of control? Is it that speech-like quality of blog writing? I mean, who’s afraid of the blogger’s voice. DeCerteau comes to mind.

To speak means to come forward and to locate oneself in one’s sphere of existence; it means to claim a modest quantum of agency. Circulation of speech carries the seed of the overthrow of the established powers, hence the interest that authoritarian regimes have in controlling the exchange of words, information, and ideas, and also the endless efforts to assure themselves total control over all modes of communication.

( deCerteau: The Capture of Speech 1997: 98)

Crikey, me and Margaret are getting radical.

I’ve got a group of undergraduates working towards their dissertations and had to re-arrange a couple of tutorials. I did this very quickly - it was a busy day. So my message probably ran something like ‘Change meeting to Wednesday 2.30pm’, followed by my automated signature ‘open a window on myvedana.blogspot.com’.

Of course the poor unsuspecting reader wasn’t to know that this was an automated signature and assumed that her kindly tutor was providing a helpful link. Somehow, in clicking the link she was redirected to a news site discussing whether or not some supermodel had had cosmetic surgery!

‘What’s this myvedana.blogspot.com for?’
she asked when we met.
‘Oh, it’s my blog….do you know…’
I began.
‘So what’s breast enhancement got to do with techno-literacy practice?’
she quickly countered. I was lost.
‘A blog’s a sort of an online journal, and I do write some pretty wierd stuff.’
I went on. She nodded as if to humour me.
‘But I certainly don’t write about breasts.’
I noted, emphatically. She smiled sweetly and then said
‘I read the page for quite a long time, but couldn’t find anything that was relevant.’
I must have looked embarrassed.
‘It wasn’t smutty or anything’ she quickly added.
‘Oh.’ I said rather weakly.
‘I’m sorry for any misunderstanding.’

Justin Hall all over again. And for an awkward moment I imagined my vast and still largely hypothetical audience following the same bad link and wondering.

I was driving somewhere in the car last weekend and :blush: I caught myself thinking about my blog and getting a little glow of satisfaction from the idea of people reading my most recent posting. Whatever it was, I must have thought it was pretty good! And that reflexive thought was, I must admit, a little bit uncomfortable. Boiling it down it’s blogging as SHOWING OFF - and, of course, my socio-cultural upbringing always makes me wary of showing off - and it does rather reduce being a blogger.

Sometimes though, when I read blogs, I get the sense that others are showing off, or to shift the idea, they are parading or promenading - displaying what they see as the interesting bits of their lives. And of course they really are interesting (sometimes). But also the more casual, throwaway postings capture my interest too. A blogger is having fun; a normally quite intense commentator leaks some ‘personal’ information or expresses an opinion with uncharacteristic vigour or a jokey blog suddenly gets serious. Even the trivial stuff - S blogs there’s snow in New York when it’s spring here, or A blogs spring flowers in Sydney when it’s autumn here - can turn out to be interesting.

So what am I really getting at? I suppose I’m underscoring the power of the reader (both the commentator and the passive consumer or blurker). The blog environment gives the reader plenty of freedom. OK, so the writer may glow with pride, thinking of her latest posting, but the reader may move quickly, perhaps dismissively through her links or even spend a desultory few seconds misinterpreting what’s there or even doing something else at the same time. But who, I wonder, spends the longest time reading my blog? Well I’m pretty sure it’s me. I love my blog and I like the way I say that stuff! It’s my space, and I like writing it and I’m now quite at ease with that fleeting thought that it’s vanity blogging. So, as a writer, I have the power and I’m in control at least for 10 or 15 minutes a day.