Blogtrax

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.

Well, waste not want not! Here’s the alternative conclusion to Inside Out, if I don’t put it somewhere it’ll get lost forever (which may not be such a bad thing after all!)…..there are a number of significant issues for literacy educators that derive from the deep learning of our engagement with these new literacy practices. We beklieve that our study throws some fundamental features of writing into sharp relief. These features apply to paper-based abd screen-based texts, but are differently nuanced (!) because of the potency of online practices which are dynamic and immediate.

Firstly, writing is essentially an act of self-representation. What motivates or inhibits writers (irrespective of medium) is as much to do with the desire to communicate or the affective pull as it is to do with content or skill.

Secondly, understanding the material affordances of the textual form are central in the sense that they offer limitations and degrees of freedom. he mulimodal and hypermodal affordances of blogging software allow for new ways of writing. We learn to work with the affordances through situated social practice.

Thirdly, communicative purposes are intertwined with our imaginings of audience and our writing, as a social practice, is located within familiar and unfamiliar social networks. In our blogs these are mulitlayered. Audience is important to our performance of self, whereas textual affordances determine the nature and character of interaction…..

Well that’s the unedited version of what I wrote on the plane. I reckon what will become the published version in the New Literacy Sampler book will actually be better. But there’s a couple of germinal ideas in this that might be worth hanging on to.

I’m probably just as enthusiastic as ever about blogging, but notice recently that I’ve been developing a couple of identity/themes. One is around the writing I’m doing - sort of chucking out ideas to see what they look like published, and to see if I get feedback. The other is much more day-in-the-life type narrative. Of course they blurr - I like that hybridity. (Interesting that’s the style adopted by Sue Thomas in her book Hello World.)

But the first of these things - the blog as a means of test-driving your ideas can be a bit frustrating. You either get no reaction; a reaction to the joke you put at the end; or a genuine bit of feedback. You can’t expect anything, but I guess I like the last one. For example, it happened here. But then it was the next day, the blogosphere rolled over and I don’t think many people are really going to comb through my archives. So maybe the blog is limited in this respect. It’s quite timebound and the level of interactivity has the status of marginalia. The blogger’s in charge.

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 was just wondering …

But I wanted to comment that I have noticed that people interact with me over different things in different spaces. The observation is this:
When I post pictures on my blog, people do not comment much or interact about them. So for example, on this post here I had only one comment - and that was received after a few days of the post being there. It is significant who commented - Mary Plain - she has asked me about photoshop several times and is also thinking of getting a camera. But in fact, I think she was just being polite in commenting - I had just commented on her blog.
Comparing this post (and there are other examples) with ones where the content is about areas of my research, people are much more keen to comment, like here.

Conversely, photos get lots of comments on Flickr. Now this might be an obvious point but lets move to some analysis.

Gee says that affinity spaces are about CONTENT. And people ARE selective over what content they want to interact about. There is a degree to which the stuff is just social. There is a lot of reciprocity that goes on, in terms of comments to and fro, but it has to be more than just social. There has to be a content PULL.

But this is just about comments. I wish we knew more about the silent lurkers - or blurkers - as Jackie would have it.

But also … why do you think hardly anyone reads this blog?

Guy mentioned that he did not want to bore readers. This is a strong sense of audience; the one to many. And then there is also the shared responsibilityof this site. We are two voices ; we have a shared purpose, to explore the idea of blogs, of us as bloggers, the ‘blogosphere’ . But for each other we are a slightly different audience, I feel.
As time has gone on I have realised that commenters give me a strong sense of audience and I tend to write, thinking about vthem. I don’t just pander, but I find it helpful to think of ‘real people’ who may read.

But in this blog I am also thinking about the ’strong academic’; the ones I don’t know who I don’t want to think this siter is too trivial. But then again I am happy about the ideas being musings, unshaped.

In an unprecedented outburst yesterday on DrJoolz I ranted about an article on how a mother, whilst praising the new blog craze for teens, also talked about the need to write contracts for her children to sign.

(Mental Note: Must not use blog to rant as this can be very offensive to others. Have learned valuable blogging lesson.)

Writing about that has since prompted me to think much more carefully about my view of The Internet generally and my view of blogging specifically.

Whilst I was under the impression that I was being a good little academic and aware of my positionality in relation to my work, I realise now how my experiences of the Internet are ofa very specific type- and so are those of my family .

I had not thought before about how our cultural capital extends to our online identities and that this has protected my family and I from unpleasant Internet exeriences. And how we do not ‘go’ to places that are the Internet equivalent of scarey alleyways - just cos we are not curious in such directions …

I was thinking about how I do not, (unlike many people I know) receive porn in the form of e mail spam (How have I escaped?) . I was also thinking about how I have only ever seen online pornography once. This was a pasted series of images in a comment on Justin Hall’s blog in response to his infamous crying episode. That was a link I picked up through Guy.

In fact Guy was upset about this as he felt he had inadvertently put porn on HIS blog, because he had linked to it. He felt he was tainted by association.

And our blogs’ fabrics are constituted of our links as well as our words and pictures (etc). Other people’s texts become part of ours, because we weave them in. And when we do that, we have to be careful that we do not misrepresent other people’s views (as I did yesterday), especially as we can potentially lead new readers to read the source in a way the original author did not intend - so therefore Will and Anya defended themselves in comments on my blog. (This is a great use of blog comments, to come back and say something in one’s defence.) All these affinities can be very positive and lead in the end to greater understandings as we visit and talk with each other. But my point here, is about how our blogs are continuous texts with each other; our links tie us together and are mutually constitutive (if I can say that?) . So in building texts we constantly re-affirm and regenerate what the group is. We are our associations. And that is why it is important the associations start off OK.

But look. Guy is an academic; Anya is an academic. Will is an academic. We have found each other through common interests through a series of links, through degrees of separataion. We have traced paths via each other and kept within a group with some pretty high status cultural capital. No wonder we love the web; we talk to people ‘like us’ and we go through the links on many people’s blogs in this way. Our network is safe.

Ok, back to the point. Many rightly worry that their kids’ blogs (etc.) will become tainted through association with others’.

An example: A hairdresser comes every now and then to our house to cut my daughters’ hair. Earlier this week she was talking about trying to keep her son off the net because of all the filthy pictures his friends send him via MSN. She said ‘they talk dirty’ and are nasty to each other. My daughter and I were amazed. ‘Why doesn’t he block them?’ she said. Our hairdresser explained that these were his ’so-called friends’ who he did not want to block.

Now all my daughter’s friends are ones she has met online; some of them come from a core group connected to a message board run by a charity for kids with ME. The others have come via recommendations from friends through this. So somehow they have come through a vetting system. Cultural capital of a sort. (On the other hand maybe my daughter has missed out on this essential adolescent bickering… is it important to go through? Maybe.)

In my little family I think we have kept to paths without realising. Bauman has written about how people trace paths through cities and experience cities differently from each other - and would describe the city very differently from each other.

This is what the Internet is like and I think I have taken this long to realise. So the lesson is, ‘be more patient with those who are nervous. ‘ They clearly have reasons, since they may have traced through paths which lead to areas where I never go or maybe they have only heard of these scarey areas and they might not know there are many safe places to go on the Net. I think I need to respect this a bit more and to be more aware of my priveleged position.

I have written about how our lives off line are blended with our online selves but had not thought about this in terms of cultural capital before. Our identities online remain tied to our offline selves in more ways than we know.