Presentations: Week of Mar. 5-7
Readings:
In class on Monday, 2/27, we will spend time talking about the Blog Challenge on hyperlinking. We will then shift to discussing the Blog Roots assignment. You should get started on these readings for Monday’s class. Be prepared to discuss at least Gillmor.
- Dan Gillmor, “From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond” (from We the Media - Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People [2004])
- Marilee Lindemann, “The Madwoman With a Laptop: Notes Toward a Preliterary History of Academic Fem Blogging,” Journal of Women’s History 22.4 (2010): 209-19. (PDF accessible through Blackboard.)
- Meredith McGill, “Lurking in the Blogosphere of the 1840s: Hotlinks, Sockpuppets, and the History of Reading"
As Rebecca Blood points out in The Weblog Handbook, blogs are native to the World Wide Web (9). It is hard to imagine them apart from the moment in techno-history when hyperlinking and instantaneous self-publication became possible. On the other hand, blogs did not arise ex nihilo in that moment and context. They borrow from and bear strong resemblances to a broad range of cultural and literary forms – from the political pamphlets and satirical essays of the eighteenth century to the literary miscellanies of the nineteenth, from the handwritten manuscripts Emily Dickinson circulated to an intimate circle of friends and family to newspaper columns and parodies like The Daily Show and The Onion. There are functional resemblances as well, in that blogs may, like some of these earlier and contemporaneous modes, serve to filter information, offer commentary, or provide testimony or witness to events. Finally, in light of the pervasiveness of pseudonymity in the blogosphere, blogs need to be placed within a literary history of concealed or disguised authorial identities. As Meredith McGill notes in her essay, “Lurking in the Blogosphere of the 1840s,” the resurgence of pseudonymity in online writing might force a rewriting of that history, suggesting as it does that pseudonymous writing may not be merely “a regrettable prologue to the triumphant emergence of the economically self-sufficient author” (which is how scholars have tended to view it) but an alternative to that model that “should remind us of the complex pleasures of keeping writing at some distance from the self.”
Over the next couple of weeks, we will be exploring these roots and resemblances as we consider the literary and cultural prehistory of blogs, bloggers, and blogging. To further our explorations, you will again work in pairs or teams to look closely at one branch of the family tree. Over the next few days, I will send you a list of writers and writings that I think would work well for the purposes of this exercise, but there are plenty of other possibilities. Talk to me if you have another idea you would like to explore. What works and writers from the past do you think resemble or anticipate today's bloggers? Leave comments here if you have suggestions, or e-mail me.
Everyone in the class will read all of the writings that groups will be discussing in advance of the presentation. In the presentation, you and your partner(s) will lead a short (12-13 minute) discussion of the qualities or characteristics in the example that you think are relevant to or evident in blogs. Focus on whatever seems useful as a way of illuminating the connections. You might look at form or function, technique or design. You might focus on persona, parody, voice, or satire. You might look at pseudonymity or “snark.” You might look at first-person accounts of war, travel, or other experiences that anticipate the blogger as participant/observer, a figure we’ll see in projects as varied as Riverbend’s Bagdad Burning and Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia. In your presentation, you should also connect past to present by citing examples from blogs that deploy similar strategies or share attributes with the historical examples you considered.
As in the Blog Tracking presentations, you should think about how the examples can help you in your own blogging. Keep this question in mind as you read and prepare your presentation: What lessons in style or strategy can we learn from earlier modes of writing that are, like blogging, topical, conversational, lively, and opinionated?
You will need to do some research to contextualize the selection you are studying and presenting. You might begin with Wikipedia, which is useful for background information and history. You should also read around in literary criticism on the work and/or writer you are discussing. The goal here is not to flatten out history by pretending that the past is just like the present. Without denying change and difference, we are simply exploring continuities and resemblances.
No comments:
Post a Comment