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.