Blogtrax

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.

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’m thinking about the architecture of blogging and photo-sharing environments and how they offer different possibilities, or social affordances for identity performance and networking. You could see the blogosphere and the Flickrverse as buildings or city-scapes which we inhabit, claim, belong in and interact within. Of course, we know there are other places - virtual worlds; MUDs; MMPOGs etc etc, but an in depth analysis of what happens, how meanings are made, how allegiances are formed and how identity is negotiated within these smaller, often inter-related domains is what really interests me.

I suppose it’s a case of belonging somewhere, having a sort of neighbourhood - a digital arena you play in. Mostly feeling comfortable in these two zones, being socialised into them and having neighbours helps. And of course you get to know people in different ways - and in turn maybe that brings out different things in you.

It’s also interesting how both blogging and photo-sharing seem to promote a heuristic frame of mind. Eve Bearne said that through reflective writing themes emerge. That’s spot on. Could you also extend that to reflective imaging? When I heard what Eve said I went wow (inside)…thinking about all those blank-page-moments of my own school life and even later those moments that education seems to run over and over again. What are you interested in? What’s your research question? Starting from scratch.

It would be tedious to trawl back through the blog, but themes develop through a process of refinement and sedimentation - other possibly fruitful lines die off in the process. Same with the imaging process. Sets in Flickr provides that organisational function, the heuristic tool (YAY!) to identify what’s beginning to emerge through the messy process of collecting.

Both the identity performance theme and the heuristic theme don’t, however, happen in isolation. So, the social affordances, the architecture of these virtual spaces seems to be what makes us feel at home in displaying our wares and inviting different kinds of interaction and, in turn shapes what we do.

Last week, or maybe the week before DrJoolz called me on the mobile about the paper. What was interesting was her comment about being ‘stuck in the middle’. She said something like ‘you know, that point when you don’t think it’ll ever get finished.’ That’s what I like about collaborative working – learning from each other about what it’s actually like! Her comment captured a very familiar feeling.

Now, a bit further on it feels like we’re working our way through the middle. The end isn’t quite in sight, but it’s imaginable! One of the interesting things that’s dawned on me is that we don’t need to tidy up/agree on things. If our super-ordinate categories are suitably robust our individual bloggings and meta-bloggings can afford to be out of harmony. In fact it would be more likely that they would be, at least some of the time.

From the methods bit, I’m putting up this draft paragraph, because I’ve been talking to various people about research positions in studying digital culture. Here goes:

If the complex interactions between people and machines lie at the heart of communication through digital writing, methodological questions about the nature of enquiry and the position of researchers are equally important. Existing work in the field of digital writing shows how researchers can adopt a number of possible relationships to the digital culture they study. This suggests that it may be possible to identify specific research positions. The list below shows our emerging ideas in relationship to these and we recognise that these may overlap, shift or indeed expand.

• Researcher as identifier of new tropes (Ito,1995; Rheingold, 2003; Lankshear and Knobel, 2004)
• Researcher as insider (Markham,1998; Sunden, 2002)
• Researcher as analyst (Werry, 1996; Shortis, 2001; Burnett et al, 2004)
• Researcher as both subject and object (Mortensen and Walker, 2002; Guy and DrJoolz, this paper)
• Researcher as activist (Gee, 2004; Prensky, 2001)

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!

In trying to interrogate the concept of affinity space(s) in the activity of blogging, I’m wondering how helpful an understanding of play and social networking might be. Are the blogs and bloggers we feature most part of an existing or emergent social network that already exists, but is somehow extended and propelled in the blogosphere? And is that space more like a playspace than an affinity space?

Play is pointless in the sense that it very rarely has a primary purpose which exists outside of itself. It is essentially non-functional, although of course, various rhetorics of play do import notions of extrinsic worth (development, therapy, learning etc). Affinity spaces, according to Gee, seem to be much more guided by purpose.

what people have an affinity with (or for) is not first and foremost the other people using the space, but the endeavour or interest around which the space is organised

So, blogs could, of course be affinity spaces, but the ones we talk about do not easily constellate around a clear ‘endeavour’ or ‘interest’. Perhaps setting play and affinity in opposition will not stand up to scrutiny, but, thinking for a moment about meeting at BGC, there were times in which we inhabited a fairly unbounded (in a sense, pointless) playspace: eg at Zoots; and other times in which we entered an affinity space (more or less purposeful) to get something done. There is of course leakage, but nevertheless some sort of distinction here.

The emergence of affinity seems to happen when we begin to migrate from simply hanging out or making everyday meanings into the activities of categorisation, reflection or knowledge exchange. In tagging what we’ve said or what we’ve seen, we begin to move out of our own space, imagining, at least, a social world. A tag cluster signals the possibility of a group and shared interest. Or at Zoots we slide into a conversation about resizing photographs or the role of comments. [In this way we drag our blogs into meatspace like identity appendages.] And Blogtrax, too, and the whole enterprise of researching blogging, drags the activity out of play space into an affinity space.

Have spent quite a while today moving all the posts over from Blogtrax (one) to its new home here. Hopefully this will help Guy and I in the long run when we use it as a database to help us write.
The next big task, (and the whole thing will have been pointless without this next step) is to categorise all the posts.
This in itself is of course an analytical process.
I have done about half with twenty more to go. It is all rather a lot of work and quite scarey as Guy might choose different catgories to me.

Hmm. Anya, how did you stay sane doing this?

And today I notice, you have a wonderful post on wearable technology.

I thought that this was really interesting.
It is Anya thinking about what she likes about blogs and it is a little bit of a different list to the one she has put more recently in her newer blog. Just a little sign about developing interests and how we use the web differently to suit different preoccupations in our lives.
I did a similar post here which Kate’s comments added to.

I love the way Anya’s new blog allows her to categorise and file things so that you can check out thins thematically as well as datewise.
We need to do that with this blog and I will investigate.

I have done a lot of different types of post over the last few months.
There have been some which have related very specifically to literacy and an exploration of what a text is.
I have reflected on ideas I have read about or heard about, which have been totally academic related. I have reported on conferences and seminars.
I have written lists of books I want to read - thus showing my orientation towards particular topics and making a decision about what kind of identity I want to present for DrJoolz.
Sometimes I have been reflective about my posts.

So I have worked hard to show myself as academic it seems; but in doing so I have been thinking academically, reflecting on my workand trying to get others to talk with me about the content of my posts. (And academics have often responded.)

I have also used my blog to plot political views during the general election; to put across academic and political views about what is on television; I have even taken the risk and made comments about the wedding of Prince Charles and Chinchilla and made less than respectful noises about the pope. I have therefore used my blog as SOCIAL and POLITICAL COMMENTARY.

I have told stories about me in pictures and in words. I have even told the world my feelings in a very uncharacteristic act of openess. This was a very strange thing to do. I have given lists which reflect my interests, my preferences. I have shown things about my family relationships and those with friends and colleagues. This posts were personal narratives. Showing myself in what I do and in in my depiction of relationships.

More on types of posts next time …