Category: BAWS

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Catching up on a boatload of online readings

I have about 15 tabs open in my browser with things I have been meaning to read and/or blog about. I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this now, so here’s a whole bunch of stuff that might be useful and/or interesting later, mostly in terms of teaching but some scholarship, too:

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Did they really mean that? (and does it matter?)

I am behind on blogging for a whole bunch of reasons (school, BAWS, getting ready for NCTE, etc.), and I will probably be catching up today and/or over the weekend. This post is one I meant to write days ago:

Via jill/txt I came across Nicholas Carr’s blog, where he writes about “McLuhan’s Web.” It’s an interesting read, and I think that Carr’s main point is that while a lot of people have rediscovered McLuhan’s work and reapplied it to the Internet, it doesn’t quite fit. Here’s a quote:

The internet does seem to represent the fulfillment of McLuhan’s vision, at least in some ways. As we’ve seen with the explosion of blogs, podcasts and homemade videos, the net encourages media participation on an unprecedented scale. If a global village is emerging, it’s on the web.

But it’s hard to imagine that McLuhan would be sanguine about today’s “electric media.� In fact, he’d probably have a hard time even recognizing them.

Television, which McLuhan saw as a cool medium, is rapidly turning into a hot one, with mammoth screens, high-definition images and surround sound. And computers, rather than freeing us from the printed word, have made text more ubiquitous than ever. Whether surfing the web, typing messages on our phones, or checking our BlackBerrys, we are wrapped in a cocoon of text that would have boggled McLuhan’s mind.

The internet doesn’t really fit into McLuhan’s “hot� and “cool� dichotomy. It is, as Scott Rosenberg wrote back in 1995, a “lukewarm� medium. It encourages participation but it also sucks up our attention and dominates our senses. When we gaze into a computer screen, we tune out everything else.

I’ve been thinking about this– the perhaps not completely application of previous theories with contemporary applications– with Barthes lately, specifically his notions of “writerly texts” as he discusses it in the opening pages of S/Z. Most often, scholarly-types refer to the first few pages to quote from Barthes on the definition on writerly (Barthes’ ideal text) of S/Z– here’s a good example of what I mean from what looks like a pretty cool site. Then most critics connect this to things like hypertext, or, as I am/will be doing with my project, blogs. But here’s the thing: most of what Barthes is doing in this book/essay is a really REALLY close reading of the Balzac story “Sarrasine.” The way I understand this then is that for Barthes, his act of reading this story and describing that reading in great and playful length in this book/essay, is what Barthes meant by “writerly,” or at least it is his example. So besides the fact that Barthes knew nothing of things like the Internet or hyperext (at least I assume that’s the case), it seems to me that the kinds of texts that Barthes is assuming that one engages with in a writerly fashion are literary. I know that Barthes writes about/studies plenty of non-literary-type texts though, so maybe suggesting that he means a writerly text to be a response to a “readerly” one is too much of a stretch.

In any event, I guess what I’m getting at is this: like what Carr is saying about McLuhan, I think a lot of folks have perhaps revived Barthes to apply it to kinds of texts he could not have even imagined. So when people say that hypertext or web sites or blogs or whatever are “writerly,” that probably isn’t what Barthes meant. At the same time, it probably doesn’t really matter what McLuhan or Barthes meant. Citing someone like Barthes to talk about the writerly nature of online texts is of course an appeal to authority: lots of people admire Barthes’ criticism, so referencing him means that the contemporary critic can also be found credible. But the appeal to authority is just a starting point; ultimately, what I think folks invoking the likes of McLuhan and Barthes are trying to do is to build new theories of things like “writerly.”

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Survey says… / Sabbatical Lite midterms of sort

I think I’m going to take the weekend off from BAWS/sabbatical/school work (other than getting caught up on my email, which will give me a chance to email some friends of mine anyway) and concentrate on stuff around the house– family things, cleaning, putting up Halloween decos, carving pumpkins, etc. After this last week, I feel like I earned it.

I finally managed to get my Blogs as Writerly Spaces surveys and human subject review paperwork submitted. I say “surveys,” but really it’s one survey (which I am going to invite folks to participate in more or less randomly and via email) and one set of case study questions (and I’m going to try to find case study subjects by the survey and also by trying to just invite some folks whose blogs I like to read). I’m happy to share my questions with anyone who is curious, and a big shout-out to friends and colleagues Dennis Danvers, Bill Hart-Davidson, Steve Benninghoff, and Linda Adler-Kassner for the advice and help they passed along. And also a big help to Joe Scazzero in the EMU faculty development center, which is one tip I would pass along to anyone putting together a serious survey: get someone to look at it who a) is an expert at survey construction and b) knows almost nothing about the topic of the survey.

As anyone who has ever put together a real survey knows, surveys is hard. They seem like they’d be easy– what first year composition teacher hasn’t had a student whose solution to a research pickle was to come up with a survey on the fly? But easy they ain’t. I puzzled over mine for the better part of the last month, and I feel like that was actually pretty quick. One of my colleagues told me a story about a survey she did with some folks way back when with a bunch of others, and took them about a year to come up with questions they were happy with.

Anyway, I’m pleased with that, and I’m also pleased that I am done with the Human Subjects Review stuff (what every other school seems to call “IRB”)– or at least I’m “done” as long as they exempt my project, which I expect they will. Not a lot of blood being drawn, not a lot of electrical shock, etc. Once that is all put to bed, I’ll load stuff up on surveymonkey and keep my fingers crossed that folks will actually participate.

And how is “sabbatical lite” treating me? Well, it comes and goes. I’ve had some weeks this semester in which it has worked out quite well, but last week was not one of them. I had to be on campus for something every day last week, and the “never before 1 pm” rule is starting to look less than workable. So in the sense that a sabbatical is supposed to be about “getting away,” sabbatical lite ain’t working.

On the other hand, not teaching (and thus not grading/commenting on a bunch of student writing) does give me a lot more time to do things like write surveys, read scholarly things, write my own things, etc. I do feel like I’ve gotten a lot done, I’m not really sure I would have gotten a lot more done if I was sabbaticalling in the traditional way, and I’m looking forward to next semester when I will essentially have an extra course release left over from splitting this one semester sabbatical over two.

Still, if I had the chance to do this over, I wouldn’t do this again. Sabbatical lite was the best choice I could have made at the time, but my advice to anyone contemplating splitting up a sabbatical themselves would be to not do it. And if I have a chance to apply for another sabbatical anytime soon, I’ll probably ask for the full year. Of course, with my son on the verge of entering private secondary school (probably) and then college (hopefully), I doubt I’ll be able to afford that….

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Gabe & Max's Internet Thing– order today!

I don’t entirely know why I think this is as funny as it is– maybe because as part of my blog research, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “blogging for money/get rich quick” thing. Or maybe this just is funny.

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At least two U.S. Presidential Cabinet members have blogs

I came across this Associated Press article (hosted by Google? I didn’t realize they were doing that nowadays), “Two Cabinet Secretaries Start Blogs.” The secretaries in question here are Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The story says that there’s a State Department blog too, but they don’t have a link to that one.

Leavitt’s blog seems a little more real to me than Chertoff’s:

“I’ve decided to wade in a little deeper into blogdom by writing one for the next month or so,” Leavitt wrote in his first entry. “I’m going to see how I feel after that time period. I may continue; I may not.”

Leavitt says he writes every blog entry himself, often late at night in hotel rooms when he is traveling. He is concerned that his entries are too long; on Aug. 20, he wrote 2,444 words about his trip to an orphanage in South Africa.

Chertoff began blogging in September so he could “open a dialogue with the American people about our nation’s security.” Chertoff comes up with an idea for a blog entry, then someone in the department writes it, and Chertoff heavily edits it, said Jeff Ostermayer, a department spokesman who oversees the blog.

The article also quotes Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who is pretty critical of these sorts of blogs:

Public officials usually are promoting policies and not offering honest reflections of what is going on, Delli Carpini said. The key to a successful blog is to make sure the information in the blog is honest, accurate and serving a public purpose. “The very same technology that can make things more democratic can also be used for manipulation and propaganda,” he said.

I see Caprini’s point, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent the typical, “garden variety” blog is “honest, accurate, and serving a public purpose.” I mean, many blogs are written under a pseudonym, and I would argue (at least I think I am arguing in BAWS) that bloggers shape their identities through their words, what they choose to discuss and not discuss, in response to an audience, and to meet their own needs as a writer. That’s not the same as what Carpini is talking about.

A lot of blogs– including these two– are popping up nowadays that are more or less PR pieces. It seems to me that the extent to which this is a “problem” has a lot to do with one’s definition of a blog. But I don’t have too much time to get into that this morning….

Incidentally, I spent about 5 minutes skimming through these two blogs, and I would say that Leavitt’s seems a lot more “real” than Chertoff’s, though Chertoff’s isn’t really just his blog, either.

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Mom's blog (but I won't call them moggers or bloms)/Messy Media on making money

From one of my google alerts comes this kind of cheezy article, “A blog of one’s own: Blogging moms find a way to have their say,” from the Press and Sun-Bulletin of Greater Binghampton, NY. It’s nothing too brilliant; just a feature piece trying to claim that the new “soccer mom” is the “blogging mom.” This is a typical quote: “Call them “mogs,” “moggers” or “bloms” — whatever you like — one thing is certain: A slew of blogging mothers are finding that writing a daily or weekly dispatch online makes them feel better about it all.”

Also from my google alters comes this, “Messy Media hopes blogs will be money makers,” from Press Gazette UK. It’s another one of these stories about bloggers hoping/planning on making money from their efforts, though the twist here is that Messy Media is a start-up with some former print journalist making the jump to blogs and the like. And there are a few numbers here about how much money people can (or, as far as I can tell, can’t) make from commercial blogging.

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Is the 'net good for writing?

Via Kottke.org I came across this RU Sirius blog post on 10 Zen Monkeys, “Is the Net Good for Writers?” wherein RU (just “R” for short?) asks some writers this question. It’s kind of interesting, I guess, I’ll have to read it more closely later for the BAWS thing, and it might be useful for teaching. But I think the answer is kind of obviously yes. I like how Clay Shirky turned the question; here’s a quote:

Dear Mr. Sirius, I read with some interest your request to comment on whether Herr Gutenberg’s new movable type is good for books and for scribes. I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about the newly capable printing press, and though the invention is just 40 years old, I think we can already see some of the outlines of the coming changes.

First, your question “is it good for books and for scribes?” seems to assume that what is good for one must be good for the other. Granted, this has been true for the last several centuries, but the printing press has a curious property — it reduces the very scarcity of writing that made scribal effort worthwhile, so I would answer that it is great for books and terrible for scribes. Thanks to the printing press, we are going to see more writing, and more kinds of writing, which is wonderful for the reading public, and even creates new incentives for literacy. Because of these improvements, however, the people who made their living from the previous scarcity of books will be sorely discomfited.

Exactly.

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Blogging scholarship competition/Blog World Expo

I found via Alex Halavais’ blog that there’s a blogging scholarship out there. It’s being sponsored by what I guess is a commercial enterprise, College Scholarships.org, though I don’t really know how you make money by giving away scholarship money. In any event, the prize money/scholarship here of $10,000 will go to one college student’s blog based on a list of 20 finalist that they came up with in some way.

If nothing else, I’m interested in this list of bloggers as potential study subjects. I think. Lately, I have been thinking that I am less interested in blog writers who have a large and adoring audience or bloggers who blog to make money and more interested in the vast majority of bloggers who have a tiny tiny audience. And as bloggers who happen to be students, these folks might cross into the “academic” realm of bloggers which I’m also trying to avoid studying. Still, this is a good list of what at least one group described as “good blogs,” and that might fit into a teaching experience like ENGL 516 or ENGL 444.

Incidentally, there is also an ad on these sites for something called the Blog World & New Media Expo. It is rather cheap– especially compared to the conference I mentioned the other day– and it would automatically be fun because it’s going to be in Vegas. But it sure seems to be nothing more than a conference on how to make money with your blog. I guess “making money” has always been a motivation to write, but I think it’s fair to say that this is a pretty naive motivation. I went to a reading last night given by a former EMU colleague, Jeff Parker, who has a new novel out from a very small and literary press, and one of the questions from one of the young people in the crowd was along the lines of “how much money are you going to make from this?” Parker kind of looked around, and without directly answering, more or less said what was true, “probably none, but lightening does strike once in a while.”