I'm trying to work through a connection between social presence, the narrative mode, and the construction of identity/the network. Also, somewhere in this (or at the end of this), is a translation into pedagogy.
The narrative mode has come to the fore through my coding; three blogs (one year's worth a piece) from three places on the graph of connectivity (one a hub, one what I'm calling "mid-point," and one from the long tail) all share one major rhetorical aspect: narrative. In my coding, I've narrowed the grain enough so that there are differences IN the sorts of narrative (ie history/past/memory/memoir, dialogue, political, current experience, etc), but when it comes down to it, mothers blogging are storytelling. The story of who/what they are, the story of motherhood writ large. The story of identity, the story of the network.
So. We've got a network of mothers, who form sociomental bonds, or bonds between people who do not (or can't) meet physically (Chayko 2), via these narratives. I imagine these bonds as the actual edges between nodes (writers) in the network; these bonds support the sharing (exhibition and reception) of events and ideas--the fidelity of those stories appears to be assessed (or given value) in terms of "realness" or how far afield from cultural norms (or the conventional notions of motherhood) the story travels. Humor, exaggeration, and bodily fluids [something important here in feminist theory about the containment and/or hiding of fluids--menses, breastmilk, tears, even--as controlling, disempowering? you can't keep the mommies down?] are common rhetorical tropes within the narratives.
As a writer tells stories, she is shaped by what she shares, how readers respond, and the stories that OTHER writers are telling. When she tells more stories once the writer begins participating in the network, the network participates in the composition process of that next story through the writer's imagination of the network's (the audience's) possible reception. How will I blog this? the writer might wonder. This is a stretch, but the prospect of sharing the story might even shape what happens during the event, before the story is even told. Which (roundaboutedly) suggests that the network--connections between writers who share stories--shape behavior and roles of individuals (mothers) and might change, ultimately, cultural definitions of such roles.
As I write this, I understand that what I'm saying isn't new--that what I describe above is the process of inevitable cultural change. Social roles, both stereotypical and actual, are in constant, albeit slow, flux. And I don't think I can make any claims about technology speeding up the process; while technology *is* accelerating cultural change, I'm not sure, past the participation factor, how networked writing is changing culture more rapidly than TV or the interweb in general.
What I think is noteworthy, though, is the very material way in which writing plays a role in this cycle of construction. I write in the introduction that there was a clear moment in my own blogging history when I knew that the sort of writing I was doing for the blog was different than anything I'd ever written, and that THAT kind of writing was the kind that I should have always been doing but hadn't been, that THAT kind of writing was the kind that I wanted my students to be able to do, but wasn't sure how to show them. It was the moment when I sat down to tell the story of a devastatingly embarrassing experience--I had been asked to leave a grocery store because my son was crying loudly. I felt it crucial that I share the story so not only could others reflect on and help me understand and deal with (what I felt like had been my) victimization, but also because I needed to make visible what I deemed to be mistreatment.
Being compelled to write about it and being acutely aware that my representation of the event would color readers' reception made this particular blog entry one of the most difficult texts I'd ever written. I must have composed and revised the entry several times, and each time I found the story different, the revisions of the representative text actually changing the experience for me. Clearly, I had written to learn before, but never with such conviction about the weight of what I was composing, never so serendipitously, and never *ever* with such a keen eye for how my audience would take up my message.
Imbuing student writers with such a moment is something that I'll be lucky to do once in my career as a writing instructor. But I think we can take the elements and try to replicate them. I just fear now, as I write this, that the arguments for replication are old:
- compulsion to write about something one has a vested interest in
- an audience that is invested, interested, and responsive (but possibly unpredictable?)
- what else? (ooh, close to the end of my juice here)
And how are these elements any different than what current pedagogy struggles with--and how might there be a solution outside of current solutions like service learning, radical pedagogy, action research?
*whew*