Current mood:	contemplative
Current music:	Interpol

Week Five: Blog, Blog Me Do...
...you know I blog you.

How many more inane subheadings can I come up with?

I guess that's a relevant question considering this week's readings, particularly the Colby et al online text. I was very much drawn in to Justin Felix's podcast, and his question "what does all this say about ethos?" His three talking points were very thought provoking, and I want to respond to each with some musings of my own...

"Ethos becomes all the more important in less defined writing spaces such as blogs."

At one time, I had multiple blogs, each with an identical purpose--to be a personal diary to record thoughts and feelings. However, I saw my ethos changing for each blog as I began to define what I wanted each space to represent. This had a lot to do with me becoming more aware of the different audiences I was likely to reach with each blog. My ethos changed over time depending on how I wanted to show myself and what discoveries I had made (some were surprising) about who was reading. So I suppose my ethos for each blog was almost a collaborative project. I think tracking people with multiple blogs is an interesting place to witness the formation of different identities online, and demonstrating the theory of a fragmented self in online spaces. I think it would be a good model for students who are otherwise resistant to such an idea (it definitely happened in my 112 class!). When I reflect on this "scholarly" blog and compare it to my other blogs, past and present (two personal journals on Blogger, a blog on MySpace, and my current personal LiveJournal blog), I find that this blog is the only one with those "inane subheadings" that I mentioned above. Why? Because I'm still trying to work out the particularities of the ethos I'm building here. Who do I want to be in this space? What kind of ethos am I responsible for? Who are my audiences? It's difficult to say. I invited my 728 classmates and Dr. Blair to my blog, but I have a personal friend who decided to subscribe. I also have my Podshow audience, since I use this blog as the podcast's homepage. Gulp! I forgot about them. I guess I want to portray myself as a smart, hip scholary with a penchant for irony. I want to be professional, but still fun, approachable, and creative. I think, in this blog, I'm trying to show an idealized version of myself as a graduate student. Does anyone else feel this way? Anyway, to Felix's first assertion, my fragmented ethos intones "I agree sincerely," "Yep," and "Hells yeah, holmes!"

"Blogs are spaces of play only if framed as such."

This idea of the serio-ludic or the "serious play" is interesting to me, and I suspect that graduate students would try to keep their "frames" (once they are defined as such) as sturdy as possible because, duh, we need to do what our teachers tell us or we won't do well in our classes and we won't get jobs. But what about taking a blog into an undergraduate classroom? Are the "frames" comparable? Even if I, as an instructor, set out a blogging assignment with a "serious" framework, I would bet that I would get some "play" responses, if only for the reason that undergrads don't always follow directions (grad students too, to be fair [we're just better at covering our tails]). And who am I to say how sturdy or permeable a frame is allowed to be? What would be my pedagogical motivations for making it as such? I wouldn't want a student to feel limited if he or she works best in a looser, less-structured environment. But what about those students (and there are many, myself among them!) who respond well to structure?

(Am I making any sense? This is making my head spin and it's 11:45 on a Friday night, and I've made 4 trips to the Detroit airport in the last 36 hours.)

"As public intellectuals, now that we are writing in a public space, don't we have a responsibility to portray education as a serious endeavor?"

That's a darn good question, Justin. Does the public space of the blog transform us bloggers into de facto employees of the Ivory Tower PR department? I think this question forces us to confront a larger, and somewhat more uncomfortable subject--how do we define "proper academic conduct"? What might the parameters be? Don't go on dates with students? Don't steal other people's work? Don't shave your head and dye the stubble bright blue hours before you have to make a plea for funding to a bunch of registered-Republican administrators? And who defines these things anyway? What roles to graduate students have in shaping the narrative of "academic conduct"? My motivations for my own conduct are multi-faceted: I am happy with my program and I want to potray it in a positive way for potential students and other interested parties. I also want to show myself as a level-headed, thoughtful, motivated individual, and someone who can mediate conflict and recognize and respect an established heirarchy--in other words, someone is suited for a career in the academy. And yet, I also want to be percieved as an agent of change, a revolutionary, a likeable smart-ass. How much of any of this is reality is anybody's guess.

My #1 Insight

Technology, in composition and rhetoric, neither wholly solves problems nor wholly exacerbates them. I think that a major characteristic of technology is its tendency to highlight the unresolved or hidden issues in every context it's applied to.

Yes.

And that's the smartest thing I'm going to say tonight.