blogging as new literacy practice
DESCRIPTION
Essay for Module 1 of the MA in New Literacies (University of Sheffield)TRANSCRIPT
The weblog medium, while fundamentally an innovation in personal publishing has also come to engender a new form of social interaction on the web: a massively distributed but completely connected conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest. (Marlow 2004: n.p.)
In this essay I will explore some of the ways in which blogging
constitutes a new literacy practice characterised by what Lankshear
and Knobel call an “active sociality” (2006: 1). This “active
sociality” is exemplified by modes of participation and displays of
identity and affiliation that mark it out as significantly different
from other forms of textual communication. I will argue that the
various practices of blogging can be best understood within the
intellectual paradigm of the New Literacy Studies (Street 1995;
Barton et al. 2000; Barton 2007) which conceptualises literacy in
sociocultural terms as ‘practices’ embedded in different domains of
life and instantiated through local, socially-specific ‘events’. As
Lankshear and Knobel summarise: “’Literacy bits’ do not exist apart
from the social practices in which they are embedded and in which
they are acquired” (2006: 13). I’ll also be drawing on the work of
various academics who have researched new and emerging multimodal
literacy practices associated with digital and mobile technologies
(Davies and Merchant 2006; Lankshear and Knobel 2006) as well as
researchers who have published in more general terms on the social
implications of digital technologies (Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006;
Keen 2008; Shirky 2008).
There are four aspects of blogging that I find particularly
interesting and which are relevant to this essay. Firstly,
blogging’s variegated practices blur distinctions between the
domains of ‘home’ and ‘work’, between private and public spheres and
between ‘personal’ and ‘professional’ identities. Secondly, blogging
frequently merges ‘communications’ media (conversational, two-way)
and ‘broadcast’ (transmissive, one-way) media (Shirky 2008: 85-7) to
create hybrid forms of text production. Thirdly, blogging is viewed
by some as “emblematic of [a] convergence culture" (Jenkins: 2006:
225) in which traditional broadcast media and user-generated digital
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content, and the participatory practices that surround that content,
have become inextricably linked. Fourthly, I’m also interested in
the ways blogging ‘remediates’, to use Jay David Bolter and Richard
Grusin’s term (1999), analogue cultural practices, refashioning both
dialogue-driven as well as text-based communicative practices
through the specific affordances of blogging software. Although
Rebecca Blood has claimed that “weblogs are not just a digital
variation on an established formula […] [t]hey are of the Web
itself” (2002: x), I will argue the contrary; that blogs are complex
hybrids of many different types of literacy practices, many of which
pre-date digital technologies.
My choice of blogs has been mainly informed by these areas of
interest and is restricted to just two examples: Blyde Life
(http://theblydes.blogspot.com), an example of a personal diary-type
blog and Greater Surbiton (http://greatersurbiton.wordpress.com/),
an example of a political/polemical blog. The respective blog
authors are not known to me personally although I have used work
connections to contact the authors to request permission to use
their blogs for the purposes of this essay and to correspond with
them via email to seek clarification on a number of questions.
Neither of the blogs, with respect to their authors, is an example
of what are known as ‘A-list’ blogs with a large readership and
listed on so-called meta-blogging sites such as Technorati; rather,
they were chosen as examples of the ‘ordinary’ blogosphere. They
were also selected on the basis of their use of popular free
blogging services – Blogger and Wordpress respectively, which typify
the sorts of technological features common to most blogs. Finally, I
was drawn to these blogs for their contrasting characteristics:
Blyde Life extensively exploiting multiple semiotic modalities and
exemplifying private-sphere discourse going public to a known
audience of friends and family; Greater Surbiton primarily, although
not exclusively, textual and exemplifying ‘convergence culture’, the
blurring of personal and professional identities and an engagement
with a wider and heterogeneous community of readers.
These blogs will be discussed in greater detail in separate sections
of this essay. Before moving on to these ‘stories from the
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blogosphere’ however, I will discuss some of the ways in which
blogs’ technological features or ‘affordances’ enable particular
types of social behaviours.
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Blogs ignore boundaries and rules, not because they are inherently subversive and defy determinism, but because they are social experiments; not out of a belief system, but simply because they are state of the art. (Lovink 2008:10)
A blog is a frequently updated website whose primary content
consists of dated entries, more commonly known as posts, arranged in
reverse chronological order. There is not the space in this essay to
describe in detail the specific characteristics of blogs, but my
illustration below (fig. 1.1) represents some of the key features.
Besides the two main sections incorporating the title and tagline
and the blogs entries, there is usually a third column which can
include a range of ‘page elements’. Commonly-used element include
sections for the blog author to describe him/herself or to define
the purpose of the blog; to list other blogs; links to earlier
archived posts; and a space for the integration of other media.
Fig.1.1: Anatomy of a blog
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Now over a decade old, the practice of blogging has grown in
popularity due, in part, to blogging software’s particular
‘affordances’, that is to say, "the possibilities for action that it
[the technology] offers” (Hutchby 2001: 449) that resonate with the
needs and interests of a wide range of users.
Metaphors used to conceptualise blogging have drawn on a wide range
of tropes: blogging is, according to Rebecca Mead, "the CB radio of
the Dave Eggers generation" (Blood 2002: 50); Cass McNutt has
described it as “somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.”
(quoted in Siemens 2002: n.p.); for Paul Hodkinson and Sian Lincoln
(2008), however, the metaphor used is that of a “virtual bedroom”
for the articulation of personal space in order to elaborate and
substantiate oneself as a social agent. As the above examples
demonstrate, blogging in conceptualised in terms of broadcast media
but also as an interactive or interpersonal medium. Geert Lovink’s
description of blogs as “social experiments” (2008: 10) captures
well a sense of a new medium whose uses and impact have yet to be
fully understood in spite of the ever-increasing number of blog
authors, commenters and readers (sometimes pejoratively known as
‘blurkers’). Blogging, insofar as it is ‘the new’ anything, is ‘the
new whatever you want it to be’.
One of the key success factors of blogging software is the low
technological threshold to participation; blog pages are edited via
a web browser, requiring neither specialist software nor advanced
technological expertise. Rachel Blood has described blog software as
“a leveler, a democratic medium” (2002: x) and most historical
accounts of the rise of blogging identify the introduction of free,
easy-to-use software such as Blogger in 1999 (Blood 2002: 7-16;
Kline & Burstein 2005: xiii; Kumar et al. 2005) as integral to
blogging’s rapid growth.
Lucas Graves argues that the technology of blogging didn't just
appear and change people's literacy practices; rather, blogging
technologies were designed to "facilitate an activity that was
already beginning to take place, in the same way that the
development of the telephone and telephone networks conformed to the
emerging practices of telephone culture." (Graves 2007: 243). He
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writes of the transformation of blogs as simple web pages to the
sort of software we recognise now which automatically arranges posts
in reverse order with a range of features I shall discuss in more
detail later. He goes on to argue that blogging, as a distinct
genre, emerged at the "intersection of technology and society:
Technology and sociocultural practice evolve together, each feeding
back into the other" (Graves 2007: 343). Technology informed social
action to some degree then but, just as importantly, there was some
social shaping of technology too.
I would argue that certain blog affordances played a key role in
enabling specific blogging literacy practices. Firstly, the
chronological ordering of posts would appear to facilitate the
uptake of blogging for certain types of text production: life
writing in the form of confessional and/or diary-type entries;
commentary on cultural or political developments; reviews of new
consumer products and so on where regular updates are required.
Moreover, most popular blog software have options to enable readers
to ‘subscribe’ to new content via email or an RSS feed. According to
Biz Stone(2004), technology, politics and diary blogs dominate the
blogosphere, lending some support to this claim.
Secondly, the dual structure of blogs – a space for primary posts
and a smaller box for secondary comments – enables feedback, review
and sharing – and makes possible new forms of online dialogue and,
as a consequence of them, loosely coupled online communities or
‘affinity spaces’ (Gee 2004). Although some have argued that the
presence of the comments feature problematises conventional notions
of authorship as “texts intertwine and merge" (Davies & Merchant
2006: 181) and readers become writers in an evolving work, others
have argued that blogs reinforce more conventional ideas about the
monovocal author writing in “a consistent and identifiable voice”
(Chesher 2005 n.p.). I’d argue that the comments box, far from
decentering the author, reinforces the notion of authorial
authority. Dialogue is certainly made possible through the comments
tool, and it is one of the affordances enabling participation, but
it is one that is in many respects determined by the main blog entry
to which it is structurally subordinate. Other kinds of dialogue and
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different types of community are perhaps better facilitated by the
following two blog affordances.
My third key blog affordance is the possibility of integrating
blogrolls, that is to say, lists of links to favourite blogs, or
blogs on shared topics, onto the side panel of a blog. Blogrolls
support the development of loosely coupled online communities of
bloggers insofar as they enable a public display of affinity with
like-minded bloggers who, although writing in separate blog space,
are bound by common interests and positions. Reciprocal linking, as
can be seen in the example of the Greater Surbiton blog, is common
and a means of confirming relations based on shared interests and
mutual appreciation.
Fourthly and finally, the ease of creation of permalinks, that is to
say, hyperlinks to a specific post on another blog, further supports
the possibility for conversation across different blog spaces and
the creation and development of online communities. Some blogging
software enables blog authors to receive a link in their comments
box every time a blog post has been linked to from another blog.
These updates, known as trackbacks, are a visible way of displaying
connections between separate blogs and demonstrate how conversations
in the blogosphere are frequently distributed between personal
spaces and not confined to interactions via the comments tool.
Emerging research has indicated that “less connected (or
unconnected) blogs represent the majority of blogs available on the
Web today” (Herring et al. 2005: 10) and that the blogosphere, far
from being “a massively distributed but completely connected
conversation covering every imaginable topic of interest” (Marlow
2004: n.p.), appears to be only partially interconnected. Clusters
of reciprocally linked blogs that form loose communities certainly
exist in parts and there is also much evidence of selective and
sporadic (“bursty”) conversational activity between blogs, often
between pairs of blogs (Kumar et al. 2005). Susan Herring et al.
conclude nonetheless that “blog conversations appear to be a
perceptually salient phenomenon” (2005: 10).
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So, blogging software offers a low-threshold means of creating and
updating one’s own “protected space” (Gumbrecht 2004) in the
expanding online environment of the blogosphere whilst enabling
participation with others in a variety of forms. In the next two
sections of this essay I will consider the use of blogs for two very
different types of engagements in what David Barton calls a
“textually mediated social world” (2001), each selectively employing
different blog affordances and each with its own distinct types of
literacy practice.
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... dozens of weblogs have an audience of a million or more, and millions have an audience of a dozen or less. […] And it's easy to deride this sort of thing as self-absorbed publishing - why would anyone put such drivel out in public? It's simple. They're not talking to you. (Shirky 2008: 84-85)
Blyde Life, Sue and Stuart Blyde's blog, was created in October 2008
and is an example of the blogging sub-genre of the personal diary.
Unlike most diary blogs which are, in Adam Reed’s words, “structured
around an ‘I’ narrative” (2005: 226), Sue and Stuart’s blog is
structured around a ‘we’ narrative – “the parents” - whose central
character is Amaya, their baby daughter. The blog's subtitle, or
tagline, The Life and times of the little Blyde, invokes various
genres of life writing (biography and autobiography as well as
fictional variants that mimic their conventions) and signals its
focus on the early days the new baby or ‘the little Blyde’.
Blyde Life uses free Blogger software and deploys, with minimal
customisation, one of its standard templates (‘Son of Moto’, amongst
Blogger’s brighter and more contemporary designs). The banner image
(fig. 2.1) sets the tone for the blog: Sue and Stuart are smiling,
their wedding rings are on display, Sue’s hand holds a shared ice
cream while Stuart's is placed proudly and protectively on Sue's
pregnant belly. This is a blog, the image suggests, about the joys
of coupledom and impending parenthood; as readers, we are invited to
share their excitement and enjoy with Sue and Stuart the pleasures
of having a baby.
Fig. 2.1: The blog’s banner image
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Sue and Stuart have retained the default Blogger ‘page element’
located in the right-hand column which enables blog authors to
describe themselves or the purpose of their blog (fig. 2.2).
Fig 2.2: The ‘about’ section of the blog
This page element is relatively short and explains the blog’s social
purpose: to inform “friends and family” about Amaya through short
textual and photographic updates and to invite its limited target
audience to post comments “‘for the record’”. There are no details
about Stuart and Sue because the presumed readership is drawn from
existing social networks of family and friends in the UK and abroad.
Unlike the Greater Surbiton blog, discussed in depth in the next
section, the embeddedness of Blyde Life in an already formed set of
offline relationships means that there is little need for detailed
self-description. Sue and Stuart’s blogging practices are consistent
with Yochai Benkler’s analysis of social uses of the Internet for
the “thickening of preexisting relations” (2006: 357) of family and
friends, both geographically proximate as well as distant. More
specifically, Blyde Life exemplifies the use of blogging as a
interpersonal communications medium; blogging here is not
broadcasting to a large audience but, rather, a smaller-scale
conversation within a community which has, as Clay Shirky puts it,
“a social density that audiences lack” (2008: 85).
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The detailed content of the ‘life and times of the little Blyde’ has
been filtered and shaped for specific audience; Blyde Life is not a
confessional, ‘warts and all’ diary detailing sleepless nights,
nappy changing or the anxieties of being a parent for the first
time. The tone is consistently light and humorous, full of everyday
details and descriptions of social events given a light-hearted
spin. The blog’s humour might be likened to conversational joking,
one of whose functions is group bonding (Boxer & Cortés-Conde 1997).
In the blog post entitled ‘Del Girl - Lovely jubbly’ (fig. 2.3), for
example, the image is of Amaya wearing a sheepskin coat given as a
Christmas gift by her grandparents. The post functions, in part, as
a thank-you message to the grandparents, but it also provides the
opportunity for conversational-style joking based on shared cultural
references (football in the Ron Atkinson and John Motson allusions –
a recurrent theme in many of Stuart’s posts; the television sitcom
Only Fools and Horses evoked by ‘Del Girl’ and the ‘Nags Head in
Peckham’).
Fig 2.3: Del Girl - Lovely jubbly
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Blyde Life has retained the comments feature of the Blogger
software, although user comments do require moderation by Sue and
Stuart prior to publication. The comments tool illustrates one of
the ways in which blogging can be used as a conversational medium.
Although not all posts received comments, many did with Stuart
generally responding via the comments box. The post that received
the most comments was, as one might expect, Stuart’s from 16 October
2008 announcing Amaya’s birth which received 8 congratulatory
messages. Stuart has confirmed that many of the blog’s readers
responded to posts with telephone calls or emails rather than the
comments tool, indicating that blogs can generate a range of
associated literacy practices using other technologies which are
instantiated in different social contexts. It confirms Daniel Miller
and Don Slater’s observation that “we need to treat Internet media
as continuous with and embedded in other social spaces” (2000: 5).
Conversations initiated in one space ‘spill over’ into other spaces;
social interactions are not constrained by either virtual or
physical spaces but flow into and out of one another.
Another way of involving the readership of Blyde Life was the use of
online polls, for example, one asking readers to guess the sex of
the baby and another predicting parental characteristics Amaya is
likely to inherit (fig. 2.4).
Fig 2.4: Online poll
Although the poll offers only a limited degree of interactivity, one
of its functions is to reinforce social connections through a
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humorous activity that draws on in-group references, themselves
presupposing prior knowledge of Sue and Stuart’s characteristics and
tastes.
In formal terms, Blyde Life is very much a photoblog insofar as
photographic images are generally the key media type around which a
descriptive or narrative text is constructed (Lankshear & Knobel
2006: 149). Photographs appear in most posts, the only exceptions
being two entries posted by Stuart on 15 October 2008 when Sue was
admitted to hospital. The blog is therefore constructed as a kind of
annotated online photo album. The blog's chronological structure
provides a more appropriate platform to record Amaya’s physical,
emotional and cognitive development – as well as her parents’
responses - or key milestones in her life (e.g. Amaya coming home
for the first time – fig. 2.5) than a specialised photosharing site
like Flickr which, although broadly chronological, has a different
means of structuring visual data.
Fig 2.5: Recording milestones in Amaya’s life
Photographical images are used here as a memory tool (van Dijck
2008: 58) to facilitate the process of creating a durable record of
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the ‘now’ of Amaya’s first months to be read in the future.
Commercial publishers have, for many years, responded to this demand
by producing baby ‘memory’ or ‘record’ books for parents to fill in
with notes, locks of hair, items of clothing, handprints and
footprints and, above all, photographs (fig. 2.6).
Fig 2.6: Baby ‘memory’ book presumed to date from the 1930s (property of Suzanne Dean)
In Blyde Life, Sue and Stuart deploy blog affordances such as the
ability to publish dated textual posts, to embed images and to
facilitate comments on them, in a way that ‘remediates’ within a
digital environment earlier literacy practices of memorialisation
exemplified by such analogue textual forms as photo albums and
memory books.
Recent research on personal digital photographic practices, much of
it informed by earlier work by Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu and
Susan Sontag, has also argued that photography plays an integral
part of the process of identity formation (Gye 2007; van Dijck 2008;
Van House et al. 2004). In particular, “[p]hotos reflect social
relationships but they also help to construct and maintain them”
(Van House et al. 2004: 7). A photograph of, for example, a group of
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friends enjoying a meal together (fig. 2.7) both represents a set of
social relationships through its content as well as developing those
relationships by embedding that image in a public blog post to be
viewed by that group of friends who will recognise themselves and,
it is assumed, feel a sense of group belonging and community. A high
proportion of images feature friends and family with Amaya in social
contexts (meals out, day trips to galleries, enjoying a drink at
home etc.). The prevalence of these sorts of images supports my
argument that the blog functions as a means of interpersonal
communication that continues and extends existing offline social
networks. In an interesting article on personal photography, Lisa
Gye uses the metaphor of a ‘suture’ to articulate the ways in which
photographic images bind shared experiences and hold together the
“narratives of group memory” (2007: 281) and it would appear that
Blyde Life’s images are used to similar effect to strengthen social
bonds and facilitate a sense of social connectedness.
Fig 2.7: Photo as ‘suture’ binding the “narratives of group memory” (Gye 2007: 281)
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Gye also argues that "photography is integral to the maintenance of
social relationships and that these relationships are reinforced by
activities such as the narration of stories that accompany face-to-
face photosharing" (2007: 282). Gye stresses the importance of
"[t]he performative act of showing and telling” (2007: 281) in the
social rituals of photosharing. I’d argue that Sue and Stuart’s
photoblog is a digital variant of this social ritual of ‘show and
tell’; blog affordances enabling the display of images (“showing”)
as well as annotation (“telling”) and some dialogue through the
comments feature.
In one representative blog post (fig. 2.8), a passport picture of
Amaya is paired with a humorous anecdote about the problems in
obtaining the image. It’s not difficult to imagine this photograph
being shown, and the related anecdote narrated verbally in a face-
to-face social setting over a cup of tea or a glass of wine.
Fig 2.8: Who’s that girl? – photography and storytelling
This particular post includes a comment from one of the blog’s
readers, exemplifying some of blogs’ conversational potential (fig.
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2.9). In this example, the comment is in response to Amaya’s
passport photo but turns into a question about a visit. This is a
further instance of online and offline spaces in harmonious co-
existence.
Fig 2.9: Who’s that girl? – comments box
In this particular ‘story from the blogosphere’, I have tried to
argue that Sue and Stuart’s blog is an example of blogging as a
performative ritual of sociability based around photosharing,
narration and conversation. Blyde Life is connected to recognisable
social rituals and literacy practices. However, the use of blog
software introduces a new layer of social connectedness and some new
forms of socially-situated literacy practices that reshape earlier
pre-digital practices.
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This blurring of lines between the audience and the author, between fact and fiction, between invention and reality further obscures objectivity. The cult of the amateur has made it increasingly difficult to determine the difference between reader and writer, between artist and spin doctor, between art and advertisement, between amateur and expert. The result? The decline of the quality and reliability of the information we receive, thereby distorting, if not outrightly corrupting, our national civic conversation. (Keen 2008: 27)
... bloggers will be jousting with mainstream journalists story by story, sometimes getting it right, sometimes getting it wrong, but always forcing a segment of the public to question dominant representations. [...] the adversarial relationship between these two forces holds the opportunity to correct many mistakes. (Jenkins 2006 :228)
Greater Surbiton was created in November 2007 and is the blog of
Marko Attila Hoare, Senior Research Fellow at Kingston University.
The title of the blog is a play on words, phonetically evoking the
highly-charged ideological construct of ‘Greater Serbia’ as well as
defining the author’s current home location. Significantly,
‘Surbiton’ signals the author’s home domain and not the professional
sphere represented by the University, located in the neighbouring
town of Kingston upon Thames. The title, Greater Surbiton, therefore
signals both subject matter but also the ‘place’ from which the blog
originates or in which it operates; not the place of work, academic
publications and professional identity but a different place where a
more personal, and partisan, identity is articulated.
The blog has a subtitle, ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good’ (the
French original, ‘Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien’, literally
translates as ‘better is the enemy of good’), which is an
unattributed quotation from Voltaire. This is also cited as a
favourite proverb in Normblog, a blog listed on Greater Surbiton’s
blogroll authored by a retired academic. Voltaire is an iconic
figure of the intellectual and functions here as a signifier of
Enlightenment rationality and a critic of intolerance. The exact
relationship between the blog’s content and the tagline remains
ambiguous although I’d interpret it as relating to the blog’s
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political stance which is generally in favour of Western military
intervention. The blog’s title and tagline invoke the realms of
politics and history, including intellectual history, and suggest a
form of writing that will be much more bound up with other texts –
more intertextual - than Blyde Life.
Fig 3.1: Screenshot of Greater Surbiton
Greater Surbiton uses Wordpress blog software and adopts the sober
and discreet Andreas04 template without a banner image (fig. 3.1).
Although images feature in all posts, this is a primarily textual
blog that generally publishes lengthy and detailed entries. Marko
has included the ‘About’ page element in the right-hand column and
uses it to both describe the purpose of the blog and to define his
own position. Marko's profile displays the sort of information that
is commonly found in institutional or professional profile pages,
e.g. work experience, publications, research interests and the like
and duplicates much of the information found in his Kingston
University profile page. However, the profile is ‘framed’ by
statements of a more autobiographical and explicitly political
nature (fig.3.2).
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Fig 3.2: The ‘about’ panel as space for identity performance
The text clearly describes the subject – “political commentary and
analysis” and purpose – the exploration of “what a new progressive
politics might mean in the twenty-first century” - of the blog. Just
as importantly, the text positions Marko politically - “I come from
a traditional left-wing background”. Significantly, it alludes to
earlier acts of definition by others – “I have been variously
accused of being ...” - suggesting that this will be a blog in which
definitions – of terms such ‘fascist’, ‘genocide’ and ‘Islamophobia’
for example – and self-definition – the ‘decent’ or ‘progressive’
Left as opposed to the ‘far’ or ‘radical’ Left’ – will be central.
Of equal interest, in terms of the structural organisation of
Greater Surbiton, is the lengthy blogroll that appears a little way
below the ‘About’ section of the right-hand column (fig. 3.3). The
blogroll is partly about personal convenience (finding frequently-
read blogs) but is also a very public display of affinity with the
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other bloggers listed who, in turn, list Greater Surbiton on their
own blogroll. The blogroll links to other blogs but also
incorporates news feeds from political commentators such as
Christopher Hitchens, David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen and links to
static web sites such as the home page of author and women’s rights
activist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Fig 3.3: Greater Surbiton’s blogroll
The blogroll is another way articulating Marko’s political
positions, personal interests and affiliations with other bloggers
who might be said to form a loosely coupled community. Occasionally,
some bloggers introduce in a post an external blog which they have
added to their blogroll. The post in the Americans for Bosnia blog
(fig. 3.4) is an example of this and illustrates the culture of peer
acknowledgement and sharing typical of many blog-based online
communities.
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Fig 3.4:reciprocal linking as community building
The blogosphere, then, enables informal communities to form – or to
help already-formed communities continue to develop – but also, as I
will argue later, provides the space for rival or ideologically
opposed communities to come into dialogue and confrontation.
Although Marko’s first post to Greater Surbiton articulated his
vision of the democratic Left, most blog posts take the form of
commentary on a news event or another publication, often produced in
response to text by Marko. The ‘ancestral genres’ (Miller & Shepherd
2004) that blogging ‘remediates’ include various types of political
journalism: the editorial but also the polemical pamphlet or
broadside. Blogging affordances support topical and brief posts,
making comparisons with ephemeral textual antecedents like the
pamphlet or broadside understandable. Blogging also provides a means
of textual production that is reactive and not necessarily
constrained by the conventions of academic literacy practices that
can delay swift publication.
Greater Surbiton is a blog comprised of what Gérard Genette calls
metatexts. Genette uses the term ‘metatextuality’ to describe the
explicit or implicit critical commentary of one text on another text
“of which it speaks without necessarily citing it (without summoning
it), in fact sometimes without naming it. Thus does Hegel, in The
Phenomenology of the Mind, allusively and almost silently evoke
Denis Diderot's Neveu de Rameau” (1997: 4). Marko has confirmed in a
private email to me his use of blogging is, in part, a corrective to
misinformation in the blogosphere. Many of Greater Surbiton’s posts
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critique or correct a range of perceived errors of fact or judgement
from a such sources as Serbianna, a Serb-nationalist website or
Lenin’s Tomb, the blog of Richard Seymour, a writer associated with
the Socialist Workers’ Party. Although I argue that Greater Surbiton
creates a space for writing that is separate in many ways from
Marko’s academic identity and the literacy practices required in the
production of academic discourse, it is clear that Marko
strategically uses his reputation and skills as an academic in the
critiques and polemics of his blog posts.
Implicit critical commentary tends to be rare, although a recent
post on the death of Harold Pinter provides one example (fig 3.5).
The post, a personal perspective highly critical of Pinter’s support
for Slobodan Milosevic, can be read as an implicit metatextual
commentary on a wide range of obituaries that appeared in the
traditional print media (e.g. The Independent, The Times and The
Guardian) and television that tended to minimise, insofar as it was
mentioned at all, the support Pinter gave the Milosevic regime. The
post employs a range of rhetorical strategies to voice its outrage
at this high-profile example of la trahison des clercs and one of a
number of examples of the blog responding to conventional broadcast
media representations of topical events.
Fig 3.5: Don’t cry for Harold Pinter – blog post as implicit metacommentary
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More typically, posts are commentaries on named, cited or linked-to
texts. ‘The Curate’s Egg’ (fig. 3.6), for example, cites a post from
the Aaronovitch Watch blog which is a riposte to Marko’s
introductory post to Greater Surbiton. Although Marko used the
comments feature on the Aaronovitch Watch blog to justify his
earlier criticism of writer and filmmaker, Michael Moore, which had
provoked a charge of hypocrisy from one of the authors of
Aaronovitch Watch, he used his own blog as the space for a more
detailed rebuttal.
Blog conversations, including adversarial exchanges such as those
found between Greater Surbiton and Aaronovitch Watch, rarely take
place on neutral territory: they are mainly distributed between the
highly partisan personal spaces of the bloggers in dialogue.
Fig 3.6: The Curate’s Egg – blog post as explicit metacommentary
24
Many of the conversational blog exchanges that Greater Surbiton is
involved in, in fact, take the form of interactions between two
separate blog sites, with comments and counter-posts published in
bursts before settling down and moving on to the next topic. The
comments function has been deliberately disabled in Greater Surbiton
- (“I don’t want my nice clean blog littered with comments from the
assorted riff-raff of the internet”, Greater Surbiton first
birthday post, 28 November 2008) - requiring commentary to take
place outside Marko’s personal blog space. Although separate, blog
posts intersect and overlap as comment and counter-comment weave
connections between otherwise bounded online spaces and constitute
what Henry Jenkins calls “prolonged public conversations"(2006:
226).
To publish in the blogosphere is to enter into a relationship with a
community of readers, and various forms of blog writing involve and
imply various forms of relationship. The political nature of Greater
Surbiton, and the existence in the blogosphere of highly polarised
blogging communities, produce varied types of relationships between
Marko, other bloggers and his readers.
Although many of the blog posts that I have cited are adversarial,
some are more supportive. The blog post entitled ‘Is Israel today
like Serbia in the 1990s?’ (fig. 3.7) is an experiment in making
public what would otherwise have been private correspondence. In the
post Marko cites, with permission, a letter from a friend taking
issue with one of Marko’s earlier blog entries. The post includes a
transcription of the letter as well as Marko’s detailed response.
It’s a post I find interesting in its attempt to refashion a more
respectful and reflective political debate within a blogosphere
where ‘flaming’ and ‘trolling’ flourish and where discourse
expectations would appear to tolerate personal abuse and ad hominem
attacks.
25
Fig 3.7: Is Israel today like Serbia in the 1990s? An exchange
In this last ‘story from the blogosphere’, I have tried to argue
that Marko’s blog is an example of blogging as ‘remediation’ of
earlier analogue practices of political journalism. Blogging creates
a space for a different kind of text production that is not
necessarily informed by the conventions of academic discourse and
which has a very different audience. The specific blogging
affordances of blogrolls and permalinks are used to support
community development and the creation of extended public dialogues.
26
“A lot of the media are thinking about blogs as a new form of publishing but it’s really a new form of conversation and a new form of community” (Joi Ito quoted in Kline & Burstein 2005: 150)
In this essay I have attempted to argue that blogging’s varying
practices constitute different forms of literacy practice. There is
no ‘right’ way to blog – an ‘automomous model of blogging literacy’
(Street 2003)? - only different ways of producing texts appropriate
to the purpose and social context of the blog.
I have argued that Blyde Life is a photoblog that enacts online
rituals of conviviality based around photosharing, storytelling and
conversation humour in the context of an already-established network
of friends and family. Greater Surbiton, on the other hand,
refashions earlier forms of political journalism that help create,
or develop already-created, communities.
In spite of great differences between the blogs, both exemplify the
socially embedded nature of this form of digital text production and
the intimate connections with established offline social networks.
27
I’d like to thank Suzanne Dean for letting me use her antique baby
‘memory’ book for this essay and Jake Abrams for scanning the
images.
My special thanks though to Dr Marko Attila Hoare and to Stuart
Blyde for allowing me to use their blogs as examples and, above all,
for taking the time to reply to my questions. I'd always felt that
people who put their stuff up on the web for others to view have a
altruistic streak; my prejudices have happily been proven right by
Marko and Stuart’s generosity.
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