prospecting
Notes toward Purpose/Rationale:
In the November 2006 issue of College English, Jeff Rice argues that "college English should be new media" (127), that college English should be "the network" (133). He characterizes the network as "spaces...of connectivity" (128) that create opportunities for "information, people, [and] places" to intersect in ways that print and conventional methods of connection and communication cannot support.
The purpose of this project will be to examine one particular community of writers who embody and enact the network that Rice describes above. Those writers, self-described as "mommy-bloggers," gained the attention of the mainstream media early last year, with an article printed in The New York Times. This article, titled “Mommy (and Me),” served as the catalyst for a firestorm of discussion about what it means for moms (and dads) to write and share publicly their parenting experiences. Essentially, the Times article characterized writers of these blogs as self-absorbed, obscenely narcissistic, and “hand-wringing” (Hochman). Responses to the article were indignant, many of them appearing on the very blogs of those writers Hochman interviewed for his piece. As a rejoinder, MUBAR (Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition) wondered how writing about one’s children might be considered more self-absorbed than the other topics bloggers discuss, such as “one’s trip to the North Pole by dogsled.” Further, she posits that the act of writing, in itself, is an act of both self-absorption and exhibition, regardless of the issues taken up.
Not only is writing an act of exhibition, but it is one of connected exhibition. The advent of Web 2.0 (in which users are no longer either producers of media content or consumers of content but instead simultaneously both) makes this connected exhibition explicit. That is, the blog as an application renders the interactivity of writing materially obvious through specific affordances, such as reader-published comments and trackbacks. The blog itself becomes a point of entry for answering questions such as: How do explicitly networked writers negotiate the balance between the representation of self and the construction of meaning as it is taken up by their readers? How do the connections among these writers inform that balance? How does the network itself, the associations connecting the writers, work to shape how those writers make rhetorical choices? I hope to find that the writing that occurs in/among well-connected blogs is a function of the ways in which the new media of Web 2.0 constructs users’ roles as continuously shifting and dichotomous. That is, blogging is not only writing but also is equally reading. The act of “blogging” does not only include producing posts for one’s own site, but also encompasses the visiting, reading of, commenting on, and linking to others’ writing.
That writing is a social act is not a new argument, however, there are several modes in which we still tend to treat it as though it were not. Current debate on intellectual property, the event-model of the writing classroom [more examples of ways writing is still treated as author-in-garrett] all indicate systematic cultural tendencies to preserve conventional notions of authority. With this examination of bloggers, I hope to establish a working definition of network theory as it applies specifically to writers that draws on the simultaneous consume/produce model of Web 2.0. Further, I imagine the emerging theory to establish the networked writing that occurs in blog spaces cannot be considered in the same ways we consider print writing, which still is able to veil the sociality of writing and knowledge-creation.