Blogtrax

I’m fascinated by the fluidity of the blogosphere. As texts blogs often appear to be unbounded - they change their look, their relationships, their links, paying little respect to any notions of fixity. Over a relatively short period of time we have re-skinned our blogs - Dr Joolz has changed provider - and we have changed the tools, processes and styles in which we blog. This fluid world is also characterised by frequent changes in reference points as the blogosphere reshapes itself. Our audience re-groups, we change our relationships to each other and we re-calibrate our frequency of commenting. Topics refresh and morph into new areas and some of our frequently-posting friends have for one reason or another become occasionals (Mary Plain and Simply Clare are cases in point). New bloggers have appeared and disappeared, and new kinds of possibilities have emerged. Some, like Kate, experiment with new forms… Professionally, apart from this shared metablog, we are both involved in Lets Get Digital and Critical Literacies - group blogs which aim to provide a forum for research and academic ideas - both difficult to promote and sustain. Is it, perhaps, that the real social affordance of the blog is about a performance of identity something that is harder for a group to achieve? Looking at the social architecture of blogging as opposed to photosharing, im or message boards one gets the sense of the personalised page - my space (isn’t the popular MySpace appropriately named, from this perspective?), an online shopwindow, a showcase, decorated like mine with my books, my CDs, my pics and so on. And I do, from time to time expend a little energy in arranging this window…yes, it’s interactive, yes, it is intertextual, hyperlinked and so on, but the starting point is me. The social architecture of other online spaces is rather different, and for me less personal. Commenting on someone else’s blog though is much the same experience as dropping a comment on a Runboard discussion group, or chatting on someone else’s photostream.

Recently, because of a project I’m involved in, I’ve been interacting with people in a virtual world. In a sense this feels much more like neutral territory - the social architecture is different, the interaction is far more conversational. Apart from the world itself, which gives the impression of fixity, the communication is far more ephemeral. Once I’m used to the subtleties of turn-taking (and waiting) in synchronous chat there’s an interesting freeflow of chat. Last night I met Andrew, who I know on RL and we talked about approaches to narrative writing in a virtual park - he was a spider, I was a dalek. I’ve also spoken to Susan in Michigan (who’s she in RL?) about building terraced houses, Zola and Rich in Finland (seen his pic on a website). Next time I visit that world is back to normal. I haven’t left a trace of myself there. My text has evaporated, my words erased. So this suggests a continuum - yes the blog rolls over (but it’s still archived); yes the blog topics change (but the old ones are still there). There is a leading edge to a blog. It’s right there where you just left it. It has a life beyond your posting, as does Flickr or a Runboard discussion and the archived memory is a key feature. Chat in whatever format is very different in texture.

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.