digital digs

Why blog? on the rhetoric of social media

I am contributing an essay on blogging for the Writing Spaces collections being put together by Charlie Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky. As part of my proposal I suggested the following

My intention is to present the essay as a series of blog posts. Since the collection will be available through a Creative Commons license, if it is acceptable to you, I thought I would post parts of the essay, in draft form, on my blog and elicit comments. This format will also allow me to demonstrate one of the key rhetorical differences between the blog and the essay: where the essay typically flows tightly from one part to another and is read as an organic whole, the blog takes a serial approach to subject matter where the relations between posts are iterative.

As blog readers and perhaps bloggers yourselves, you already know this, but I bring this up as I plan to be carrying out this blog-essay composition here over the summer. I'd appreciate any feedback you might hae along the way with the understanding that some of your comments might end up in the essay itself. (If you mention that you don't want your comments included then I won't include them.)

Writing an essay for a first-year writing course on blogging isn't as easy as it might appear. Obviously blogging represents a broad range of discursive practices so I intend to focus on the uses of blogging for novice writers and the advantages of maintaining a blog about one’s area of professional or academic interest.

For the novice writer, perhaps the most important quality of the blog is its invitation to a regular writing practice. Nothing is more important to the development of a writer than a daily writing practice. A close second though is the opportunity a blog provides to build an audience and purpose for one’s writing. In choosing to write about one’s area of professional or academic interest and connecting with an audience, one has the ability to engage current and important issues in one’s field. This provides an opportunity for students to articulate the relevance of their studies for themselves.

In my view, the fundamental challenges of blogging are not very different from those of any kind of writing. One requires sufficient exigency to write. Where does this come from?

• An urgency to the subject matter (e.g. a current event)
• An important and reasonable purpose (e.g. writing a job letter to get a job)
• A sense of authority, feeling qualified to write about a subject
• A strong personal interest (e.g. creative writing, political writing)
• An audience that will give you positive feedback

One doesn't need all of these. Over time, it is likely that different exigencies will emerge. More importantly, as one develops a writing habit, one begins to think less about needing a reason to write. Hopefully there is always some reason of course, but I think that as one becomes a writer that the act of responding to one's experiences with writing becomes more natural or expected. It simply becomes what one does. As a regular writer or blogger one begins to trust that exigency or purpose will become clear through the act of writing.

The best analogy I can come up with is being vegetarian. Most anyone could decide to not eat meat for a day or two. In fact, you might happen to not eat meat one day without even thinking about it. If you chose today to be a vegetarian, the first week would seem strange. The first month might seem very odd. You might think "so this is what it is like to be a vegetarian." But it isn't. At least not for me. I've been a vegetarian for several years and I give no more thought to eating a hamburger or a chicken leg than most people (in the US anyway) would give to eating a dog. In other words, it doesn't seem strange to me to be a vegetarian, like I'm not eating something I want to eat or should be eating.

As a novice writer, starting to write seems as odd as becoming vegetarian. We know there are writers and vegetarians out there, but we aren't those things. We may write sometimes, just as we eat vegetables, but that's not our identity. What would it mean to make writing a part of our identity? For it to be as much a part of our daily habits as the other things by which we identify ourselves? Blogging is a way to seek an answer to those questions.

why blogging is hard

A  couple weeks back, Will Richardson mused on the continuing challenges of blogging, even after 3000+ posts and an estimated million words. I'm not there yet (600+ posts and an est. 400,000+ words), but I understand where he's coming from. As you probably know, Will spends a lot of time working with teachers. He visited Cortland a few years back, so I know first hand that he does some great work inspiring folks and showing them the possibilities. But as he notes in this post,

a good number of people still find the thought of publishing to an audience, even a relatively small, private audience of like-minded souls, to be too daunting. It’s just way outside their comfort zone, and they just believe that their contributions would either not be relevant, interesting or useful. It’s hard to nurture these folks, to convince them to take small steps, to help them see the potential upside.

To me this is the fundamental rhetorical challenge and risk of any writing. Of course, before blogs, very few people had to worry about being relevant, interesting, or useful as writers. The opportunities for publication were very small. Now that that technical obstacle has been lifted, one must face those rhetorical challenges directly.

Anyone can have a blog. It's simply a matter of rising to the challenge. I see my students facing these challenges every semester. Right now, students in my online course are engaged in a microblogging project. They've all just joined Twitter. The reactions to Twitter and blogging in general are not surprising, I think. Students tend to wonder what they should write about, who would read it, and why anyone would care. They imagine, as many people do, that blogging is a kind of narcissism, which it certainly can be, if one is narcissistic to begin with. However, I tend to think such critiques are more a reflection on the critic and on a failure of rhetorical imagination.

Think of it this way. Why should anyone care what you think and do with your life? Are you not thinking or doing things that might be relevant, interesting, or useful to others? If an accounting of one's thoughts and actions result in a stream of narcissism, then I would suggest that one has bigger problems than a narcissistic blog: one has a narcissistic life.

Yes, you could read my tweets or facebook status updates and find declarations about going to the gym or heading to campus to teach this or that or taking my kids to soccer practice and so on. Yes these are mundane matters. And they probably mean very little to anyone. But a friend I haven't seen or heard from in 15 years sees that I'm regularly at the gym and takes that as an opportunity to write to me. A former student sees I'm teaching the Phaedrus and uses that as an opportunity to talk about maybe going to grad school. A colleague, who I don't know very well, sees I coach soccer, strikes up a conversation with me at a conference about it, and we become friends. These things may not matter to you, but they do matter to me.

Of course twitter also becomes a way of sharing interesting things discovered online and having quick conversations, so it is not all daily minutiae. But my point is that even that minutiae can become a way of creating a networked identity that becomes a basis for stronger and more productive connections.

But it is hard. I'm not one who writes about personal matters easily. I have never really blogged about my personal life beyond innocuous tweets. Perhaps it is because of the same concerns that Will notes. Perhaps it is because (for good or bad) my life is often here. I interact with the world as a writer/blogger. Part of that is a continual interrogation that asks "so what?" It asks us to look at the world and meet the rhetorical challenges of writing. Doing so will take one's life and thoughts in particular directions.

And maybe this is the thing, in the end, that is so hard. If one can answer the rhetorical questions of genre, audience, and purpose, to be a blogger (or maybe any kind of writer), one must still take up, at least in part, a particular relation to the world, a relation that looks at the world as a spur to composition. I fear I've been in that position for so long now that I've forgotten what it would be like to live otherwise, but I would have to imagine that the transition would be difficult.

Blogging teleology

Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks. Some are more time intensive, others less.

I was talking FTF with Derek about this a couple days ago and we both said presented with the question of whether we imagined we'd be blogging in 10 or 20 years that the answer was "of course not." One of the things Sifry's 2008 State of the Blogosphere reports on is the changing nature of what blogging is. So even if we were doing something that we still called "blogging," it wouldn't be this.

So where is all this leading? Whatever this is.  I suppose I started blogging to investigate this question. But in some ways it is a broader question. Why write? It doesn't surprise me that the vast, vast majority of blogs are started but quickly go silent or are rarely updated with no sense of rhythm or exigency. Writing is hard. Yes the blog gives the average person the technical ability to compose and publish texts. My sneakers give me the techncial ability to run a marathon too. And though I jog on a near daily basis, I'm not running any marathons.

Blogging is an endurance event as well. It's not about the individual post. It's about doing it on a regular basis and getting back to it when your habit fails. Actually for me it is a little more like meditation than jogging in this respect. I'm always getting back to meditation and getting back to blogging.

That might suggest that there is some objective, or if not an objective at least a trajectory carved out through the practice of regular blogging. I imagine one can be interpreted from this blog or any other. However, not surprisngly, I don't see this as about telos. I'm not trying to get anywhere (sorry). Instead it is the regular practice of writing that interests me--in all of its myriad components: an engagement with rhetoric and composition that can only come through writing itself.

So "blogging" may change and I may stop blogging someday. I am sure I will. But I will always be doing this.

shaking free of computing woes!

I hope to be getting back to blogging after a week of vacation followed by a series of annoying computing woes. First my router went down at home. Then I went to school to discover that the College has been messing with the email. Apparently on August 12th they decided to stop POP and IMAP from working the way it had in the past. I thought I was accessing my Cortland email through my gmail. As I was away most of that time and checking email on my iphone I just didn't notice that the Cortland stuff wasn't coming through. Missing those emails was a pain. One of my colleagues stopped me in the hall and asked if I was angry with her b/c I hadn't responded to her email. Plus there was a number of student emails I missed.

But the real pain is how I am going to move forward at this point. The college made this change for security purposes, specifically problems with phishing and spam. I understand that. I get 50-100 emails a day, sometimes more, but that's a good average. My gmail also catches around 50 spam messages a day (plus about another 100 more through kpraxis email, that thing is ridiculous!). But they all go into the spam filter. I never see them unless I want to. It's pretty rare for them to get through.

So anyway, I've got an idea about how to get rid of spam. We can just stop using the internet. Or at least email. Short of that, we can try to tie it down so much as to make it basically unusable anyway. The trick is to find the balance, I suppose.

So here is what Cortland has left me. I could access my account through webmail. But the webmail is horrible on a Mac. You can't search. You can't filter messages. It's just a big pile of messages. Worthless.

I could use VPN and Apple Mail. The thing is, I don't really care for Apple Mail. Plus having to get in through VPN is just an additional hassle.

Then there's the matter of access via my iPhone. You can set up VPN on your iphone, so maybe that's a possibility. Again though, this all just seems like an unnecessary hassle when I can choose from any number of free e-mail services like gmail.

What possible reason could there be for using my Cortland email?

So my solution is to just use Gmail. Maybe I'll set up a second Gmail account for personal use. That's not a problem. I've already informed my students and advisees of my gmail address. And I've changed my contact e-mail in the college's information system.

number games, reputation economies, and Aristotle (of all people)

Danah Boyd posts on Many-to-Many about the "number games" that often drive online participation. As she and the commenters on her post point out, one's numerical identity whether it be a character's level in Worlds of Warcraft or number of MySpace friends or hits on a blog or rating on eBay or whatever, surely drives participation in a number of Social Software situations.

One of those commenters references research done in online gaming, where Richard Bartle identified four gamer types: Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers. As I understand it, the Achiever-type is quite common and would be characterized by the desire to achieve new levels or a higher reputation, numerically represented. The way we regularly talk about this is in terms of a "reputation economy." There's an interesting article in First Monday on the uses and abuses of recommendation systems (e.g. Amazon) for the purpose of raising one's reputation. Again, I'm not familiar with Bartle, but it strikes me there's some connection there.

That said, it strikes me that we are seeing a twisting of reputation economies in the development of numerical evaluation systems. Reputation economies are gift economies, where the idea is that what is offered (in the case of Social Software, information) is given freely. Gifts imply some obligation on the part of the receiver, of course, but it is not a fungible exchange; it can even be a case of "paying it foward" so to speak. However, the inclusion of a numerical system effectively commodifies the exchange. One can see this fictionalized in Bruce Sterling's Distraction were characters in reputation economies rise through the ranks and then can essentially spend their reputation (with the result that they get demoted). Google transforms the entire web into a kind of reputation economy, where the gift of putting a link on your website increases the linked sites visibility. Clearly this is a numerical reputation which is regularly commodified and sold.

I suppose I could critique this commodification, but I want to set that aside for a moment. Instead I want to look at this as a classically rhetorical concept, ethos. From this perspective, the primary problem of numerical reputations is that they undermine the ethos of the giver. When one writes an evaluation on Amazon, does one write honestly or write to improve reputation? It is not a problem that can be resolved but rather a question of rhetorical evaluation that must be folded into one's reading.

Certainly this is at stake in academic communities, which is clearly a reputation economy. I don't mean to suggest that academics lie or plagiarize or falsify results to try to improve their reputations (though all those things do happen sometimes). Instead, I'm thinking more subtlely about the motivations for publication. I need to publish to get tenured, to get a raise or promoted, and/or to gain some notoriety in my field (which might lead to a better job down the line). Are such rewards an appropriate motive for research? Clearly we seem to think so, because we make such connections quite transparent. And I'm not complaining about that. Honestly, I'm not. However, I can't help thinking about that when I read an article. I think, this is the thing someone wrote to get tenure or whatever. And I'm sure it would be the rare article where that is the sole motivation, but one would be foolish to think this concern wasn't at play. Obviously the same is the case with any other writing in the marketplace: there is always a commodifiable goal.

Anyway, I digress. Boyd's point is about the desire for a great reputation driving participation in Social Software. I have circled around to suggest that when reputations become commodified in some numerical representation (e.g., a Top 100 Reviewer on Amazon or characters or items in a MMORG you can sell on eBay or eBay Seller reputations for that matter) they are ripe for cashing in. And when that potential hangs there, one must carefully consider the ethos of the gift you are about to receive.

technorati tags:reputation, economy, ethos

trackback spam

I've temporarily removed the listing of trackbacks from my site as my trackback function was spammed by multiple rape porn links. I know that I can do IP comment banning. I wonder if I can do the same with trackbacks? I'm hoping the Typepad folks will have an answer for me. Have others experienced this?