I think I read a little bit about narrative paradigm back in undergrad, maybe in my intro to lit crit class, since that seems to be the class that I got the most theory in (and we read the most in).

I'm trying to find a good framework (looking for bulleted lists) to see if some of what I'm finding in the code can fit and if I can makes some sense out of what I've found through this paradigm.

Fisher gives me a lot to work with:

From Dewey: community only exists because we are interested in others and because we want to "tak[e] part in conjoint and cooperative doings" (3087-308).

Again from Dewey: community therefore exists only as a result of communication, which Dewey defines as "a process of sharing experience [until] it becomes a common possession. It modifies the disposition of both parties who partake in it" (308). I'd just like to stop right there and say that Dewey just stole nearly my entire argument. He's only missing the last loop back: where the cycle of community construction and "disposition" construction happen in a continuous cycle.

But then Dewey actually DOES say, kind of, what I'm thinking: "Society...not only continues to exist by transmission, by communication, but it may fairly be said to exist in transmission, in communication" (308).

"...genuine communication cannot be the usual forms of monologic discourse. Whenever communication is strictly monologic, whether in debate, in conversations, in friendly chats, or in lovers' talk, real relationship is nonexistent" (310).

more in a bit...

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)
  

*whew*

writing is/as social
writing is/as public
writing as a mode of learning and exploring, as well as a mode of communication--both of which are public/social

So I'm looking for an epigraph of sorts, or some insight, and what I'm finding is that for composition studies, "public" doesn't necessarily mean shared or social in the ways I often find myself meaning it. Instead, public means civic. It means "for the greater public good." Public means democratic. Public means consensus.

For Paula Mathieu in _Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition_, the trope is "taking it [writing] to the streets."

“At the heart of this call to the streets is a desire for writing to enter civic debates; for street life to enter classrooms through a focus on local, social issues; for students to hit the streets by performing service, and for teachers and scholars to conduct activist or community-grounded research” (1-2).

Christian Weisser in _Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere_ talks about how the public is a thing outside the classroom, something that we can use as a model for the classroom, and as a place that our students can "compose more meaningful significant work" (23), but the classroom itself isn't a public space.

_Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text_ (eds Isaacs and Jackson) catalog ethical and logistic issues contingent with taking student writing out of the classroom and making it "public."

What I'm getting from this cursory search is that either I don't really know what public means, or that I'll have to work to think more carefully through the dichotomy of "public/private" in order to talk about public writing and the work that network writing does. I (probably erroneously) think of the terms private and personal as similar enough that public works as an opposite for both.

And maybe "public" isn't really what I mean. I mean shared; I mean not hidden; I mean outside one person's head and into the air, onto the page, onto the screen, into the ether. I don't (really) mean toward action, or for a greater good, or for social change. Instead, I see (networked) writers themselves as the end point, as the object of change--that in the making of public one's experiences and ideas, the transformation happens in the writer as well as the network/public.

Maybe the opposite of personal IS NETWORK. Maybe.

Purpose and Rationale
The phrase “network literacy” as referring to particular social writing practices may have been first used by Jill Walker, author of the weblog jill/txt and professor in the Department of Humanistic Informatics at the University of Bergen. In 2003, she defined network literacy as “writing in a distributed, collaborative environment” (Walker). The purpose of this project will be to describe the discrete practices of network literacy in order construct a rich definition; such a definition will help us understand the shifting roles of writers and our conventional notions of authorship.
Stuart Selber offers the major framework for this study, defining digital literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy in Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. By studying a blogging community's uses of these literacies, we can observe a network in its entirety, which Jeff Rice characterizes 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. What are those opportunities? In the environment of Web 2.0, they are opportunities for network actors to be both reader and writer simultaneously. In order to observe the practices of writers who negotiate networked writing, I will study “mom bloggers.” I’ve chosen this community for a number of reasons but primarily because their network is both self-identified and shares a specific discourse. The purpose of this dissertation is to understand how mom bloggers build and use social capital as network rhetors, and how network literacy is defined by these practices. The information gained in this analysis can then be turned back to the classroom, back to rhetorical instruction.
Mom bloggers gained the attention of the mainstream media in late 2005, with an article printed in The New York Times by David Hochman. 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, Jen Lawrence of 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” (Lawrence). Further, she argues 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 writers’ 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 debates on intellectual property, the event-model of the writing classroom, and many pedagogical approaches to plagiarism all indicate systematic cultural tendencies to preserve conventional notions of individual, autonomous 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, a theory of network literacy will prove that networked writing cannot be considered in the same ways we consider print writing, which still is able to veil the sociality of writing and knowledge-creation. In defining network literacy, I propose to first examine current scholarship on digital and new literacies to ground my approach. Then, I will examine research on network theory. I imagine that where the discussions of digital literacy and network theory overlap, I will find an initial conceptual framework to describe those rhetorical moves that bloggers make in networked writing.
Influential Existing Work
This project will draw on texts that involve research in network studies, which emerges from disciplines ranging from anthropology, social science, and information science. Scholars such as Steven Strogatz, David Weinberger, Duncan Watts, Steven Johnson, and Albert-László Barabási examine the ways in which individuals order themselves and the systems (cognitive, biological, technological) that support the emergence of order from chaos. A significant portion of my hypothesis concerning network literacy draws on the connections between writers, the ways these connections are forged, and the ways these connections affect writers’ and readers’ rhetorical strategies.
Also, I’ll draw heavily from the field of rhetoric and technology, specifically those scholars and texts that deal with technology and literacy. Stuart Selber’s Multiliteracies for a Digital Age carves literacy into three constructive segments: functional literacy (users can operate computers as tools), critical literacy (users understand computers and software as artifactual and therefore subject to critique), and rhetorical literacy (users understand how the tools shape and inform meaning and are able to both manipulate meaning and reflect on their manipulation) (Selber 25). For Selber, digital literacy is not a “technical subject” but instead, like Jeff Rice argues, something that English departments should consider an organic component in that it comprises “values, interpretation, contingency, persuasion, communication [and] deliberation” (235). To Selber’s list I would add issues of genre, audience, and reading-writing interactivity. The advent of Web 2.0 has required that we reexamine how particular digital environments invite (or mandate) that users be aware of their ever-shifting role as both reader and writer.
Possibly best described by Tim O’Reilly (whose company O’Reilly Media also appears to have been instrumental in coining the term) the idea of Web 2.0 began as a discussion in response to the dot com break down in 2001, when many of Internet(-based) businesses suddenly found themselves bankrupt. Even as start-ups and investors saw money and dreams suddenly up in smoke, the World Wide Web still appeared to be burgeoning, teeming with activity. And, they (O’Reilly Media and MediaLive International, the co-founders of the annual Web 2.0 Conference) observed, that activity was notably different from many of what had become the conventional notions of what it looked like to use the Internet. In other words, some of what the Internet had initially been used for had shifted, or was shifting, into something subtly, but markedly different. Essentially, Web 2.0 “harnesses collective intelligence” and acknowledges users of applications as “co-developers.” Web 2.0 makes the beta version king; monolithic releases are eschewed for periodic updates that take into close consideration user experience. The traditional producer/consumer (or writer/reader) dichotomy is conflated; questions of audience and genre (in addition to Selber’s list of considerations for digital literacy) are further complicated; writers/readers must revise their conventional rhetorical approaches based on their new, dual-direction role.
This dual-direction role of writer/reader, and the role of the individual in the network, will find basis in both literary theory and social network theory. Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, names social capital as one of the primary connectors in transforming individuals into groups. Social capital works as a kind of currency to be shared in reciprocal fashion: “I’ll do for you if you do for me” (20). Putnam offers two levels of social capital: bonding social capital, which creates exclusivity; and bridging social capital, which connects outward or creates inclusivity (22). Bonding social capital is created by “homogenous groups” such as ethnic fraternities or country clubs (22). Bridging connections “are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages” like the civil rights movement (22). Putnam argues, “[t]o build bridging social capital requires that we transcend our social and political and professional identities to connect with people unlike ourselves” (411). This transcendence is already arguably a component of electronic networks: “No sector of American society will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet…Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication that reinforce community rather than forestalling it” (410). Putnam’s concern is that “virtual community” is not as good as “real” or “face-to-face” community. His call is for us as a nation to return to making the civic connections of yesteryear, finding ways that Internet technology can support the rebuilding of conventional communities (“place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks” [411]) rather than replace them. Putnam would be pleased to find that blogging has already fostered these sorts of conventional networks. For instance BlogHer, an annual f2f conference on blogging, emerged from simple connections made between women on their own, individual blogs. BlogHer has evolved into a sizeable community of women writers. The BlogHer conference is as much about seminars on feminism and workshops on using Photoshop as it is about reinforcing the virtual into the place-based. Another example of blog networks evolving (or succumbing?) to physical meetings is that of the Chicago RBFers. The RBF (or “Running Blog Family”) is supported by completerunning.com, a site dedicated to issues of running and racing. Any blogger can join request his blog be added to the list (which numbers 1023 at the time of this writing). In the summer of 2006, a group of RBFers based in Chicago began periodical, informal meet-ups at local eateries. The social capital that emerges from “virtual” connections is as “real” as those that involve closely shared geography. Therefore, there are important implications for studying network literacies that extend beyond blogging and other Web 2.0 applications. That is, I expect that my research will uncover that network literacy and related practices don’t only exist in electronic genres—I expect network literacy to open a discussion concerning the anticipated rhetorical paradigm shift that many composition and rhetoric scholars argue is happening now.
From literary theory, the discussion concerning the roles of authors and audiences is ongoing. In his essay “The Death of the Author,” Barthes argued that authors as we defined them (and still, for the most part, as they are defined currently), are merely “scriptors” that do not exist before the text itself is written. Barthes argued that authorship and literature are a function of capitalist ideology (143). Ongoing discussion of intellectual property illustrate that things like money and competition still motivate definitions of authorship; however, if we consider the Creative Commons (CC) licenses that some bloggers post to characterize their approach to intellectual property, we see one way in which this conventional definition and its supporting ideological structure is shifting. The CC offers a non-commercial share-and-share-alike license, which essentially allows “consumers” of information (text, image, etc) to re-use, re-publish, mash-up and mix the original content, as long as the new content is licensed under a similar agreement: it can’t be sold, and must be shared. Barthes’ early insight that “text is not a line of words releasing a single…meaning…but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146) is more radical than the mission of Creative Commons, which works to create a more “flexible” layer of copyright law so that intellectual property can be reasonably shared and re-mixed. In other words, CC does not completely espouse the “anarchic freedom” of “nothing’s original”; however, its licenses appear to be conceptually linked to much of what Barthes posits. For instance, three of the four licenses allow specifically for sharing and remixing (or clashing and blending) of content.
Methodology
Social Network Theory and Small-world Networks
In order to develop a theory of network literacy that allows us to describe networked writers and to think about how writers behave in highly connected environments, my initial work will be to narrow my subject-pool from the dangerously nebulous (and innumerable) “mommy-bloggers” into a field more approachable. In order to do so, I will be borrowing from social network theory and its data collection tools, as well as the small-world network model as described by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees. Each of these systems provides me with vocabulary to position mom blogs in relation to one another, and allow me to ground my subject pool selection on substantial network models rather than random searches.
My study corpus will comprise a small-world model. Popularly known as “six degrees of separation,” this model explains the ways in which networks manifest redundancy or clustering, and that in spite of this clustering, networks still are able to connect individual nodes that are seemingly disconnected. Duncan Watts explains, “[t]he claim of the small-world phenomenon…states that I can get a message to anyone, even if they have absolutely nothing in common with me at all” (41). As sociologist Granovetter found in the 70s, it is often the connections made across clusters that are the most useful: “Paradoxically,…it is not your close friends who are of most use to you. Because they know many of the same people you do, and may often be exposed to similar information, they are rarely the ones who can help you leap into a new environment…it tends to be the casual acquaintances who are the useful ones because they can give you information you would never otherwise have received” (Watts 49). The connections across clusters are called weak ties (Granovetter). As I explain below, it is these weak ties that connect the blogs that comprise the study corpus.
Social network theory assumes that “small scale interaction becomes translated into large scale patterns” (Granovetter 1360), and provides a theoretical model, or a guiding vocabulary of terms, that I can use to narrow the subject pool. For instance, “strong [interpersonal] ties” can be measured by “a…combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and…reciprocal services” (1361). Further, “mutual choice” can also be an indicator of a “strong tie” (1364). These quasi-quantifiable terms like intimacy and reciprocal services are visible components in a network of bloggers. And the nature of the blog as a computer-mediated communication tool allows writers to develop these strong ties as Granovetter describes them; however, in trying to compile a useable collection of texts to study, to begin the kind of close textual analysis necessary to, for instance, determine whether “mutual confiding” exists would be prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I plan to initially use only two of Granovetter’s strong tie gauges; this will preserve the integrity of the assembly by assuring those blogs that remain in the subject pool are indeed highly connected to one another. This connectivity assures me that the study corpus is indeed networked in the sense that the writers’ and readers’ roles are shared and constantly shifting within that community.
The two components from social network theory I’ll apply in assembling the collection of blogs are “reciprocal services” and “mutual choices.” One function of blogs is that writers are able to, and often do, link in two directions. Writers can post outward links to other writers; that is, in a blog entry or on the main index (front page) of the site, the blogger can create a direct path to another blogger that readers can easily follow by “clicking through.” Most often these outbound links appear in a semi-static “blogroll” or list of bloggers the writer endorses or reads regularly. In addition, some blog applications afford the added dimension of “trackbacks” or incoming links, where a blogger can essentially post a link to her own blog on someone else’s site. Bloggers often do this when they want to respond (on their own site) to what another writer has posted, and the trackback provides a link to that response.
These linking practices provide a map for me to trace the ways in which bloggers self-select in connecting to one another. That is, bloggers sometimes will construct and maintain their blogrolls based on who is linking to them. In other words, a link can be seen as a gesture of appreciation: “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” At the same time, however, links also operate in a more conventional manner, where many bloggers link to the same popular writers, who often do not use blogrolls or post many outbound links. Through Technorati (technorati.com), a service that tracks the links between blogs, I can search for blogs that self-describe using tags like “motherhood” or “parenting” and then rank them based on their “authority” or number of incoming links.
Once I construct a list of most popular mom blogs, I’ll begin to work through them to find the highest ranking of the group that also publishes a blogroll (outward links to other bloggers), and this blog will serve as the starting point for the compilation of my pool. I will not begin with the most-linked blog (the search consistently returns Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com) because it has no semi-static list of outbound links. Therefore, while dooce certainly exhibits a “mutual choice” that other bloggers make, Armstrong does not offer the “reciprocal services” in terms of linking back to her readers. I cannot begin with her blog and follow her links to describe a small-world network; beginning with dooce would not produce a network with a significant “clustering coefficient” (Watts 77). In other words, while Armstrong’s blog might be heavily connected, those connections are, for the most part, only running in one direction: towards her. Though dooce is a hub with over 5,000 other bloggers providing links in, it doesn’t provide those readers with ways of connecting with or between one another.
Development of the Project:
Once I assemble the study corpus, I’ll apply content analysis, in which I read each text carefully, working to identify the rhetorical stance and strategies of the writers and to determine which exhibit certain characteristics of connectivity such as longevity, connected discussion, reliable readership, and consistency. Possible coding features will include those of both fine granularity, where I notice and track moves such as the purposeful use of hyperbole for shock value, as well as more macro-rhetorical moves that occur over time (and textual spaces), such as the treatment of a “misstep” where the writer works to remedy a firestorm of negative comments in response to a controversial post.
I hypothesize that close examination of the study corpus will reveal practices of network literacy that I will then be able to describe. I’ll approach the blogs-as-texts by drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) as a driving theoretical methodology and by relying on content analysis for the systematic material coding of the blog posts. ANT requires that I approach my texts as performative traces of action—action which is the result of a network of people, objects, and ideas informing (or constitutes) a particular actor (here, a particular blogger); the blogger not only acts within the network but also as a product of the network (Latour 46). I anticipate that a theory of network literacy will acknowledge a similar concept in which the writer is both creator of and created by the network in which she writes (similar to Barthes’ theory concerning the death of the author). Careful examination of the texts will include not only the textual components for rhetorical analysis but also the tools the writers use in the construction of their texts, to include such features as an external photo and image hosting service (like PhotoBucket or Flickr), visitor or stat counters, tag clouds, embedded video, merchandising, blogads, etc. The construction of these three major data components (which writers exhibit connectivity, the data gathered from content analysis, and the overview of which writers use which external tools) will allow me to, through juxtaposition, identify whether any of the components are correlative. For instance, I extrapolate that those writers who embed video might also have a fairly high comment count per post. Also, my experience indicates that those writers who offer merchandise sometimes use hyperbole and/or shock (both in their writing AND as part of the merchandise itself).
Applications
Why should we consider important the ways in which these writers perform, construct their identities, and connect with other writers? What insight can we gain? The writing classroom has something to take away from these writers who write near-daily; who write as part of an explicit larger discussion; who write to make sense of the world around them; who write in sometimes “unsafe” topical territory; who explore, examine, experiment with their writing and the composition of visual texts; who write without apparent external compulsion. I hope to make some preliminary comments not necessarily on how blogging should be used in the classroom, but how we can learn about the act of writing itself as an inarguably social act from the ways that bloggers conduct/construct themselves and their texts. That is, the application of this study is not in an argument to implement blogs as a panacea for the writing classroom; instead, the argument, as I see, will emerge as further evidence for existing theories concerning authorship, intellectual property, collaborative writing, mash-ups, and the march of the discipline of composition and rhetoric into the next cultural paradigm shift.

Tentative Schedule of Chapters:
The following is a tentative breakdown of the chapters which outline briefly how the sections will work as a unified project:
Introduction: The first portion of the project will argue that an examination of networked writers and a definition of network literacy can enrich our understanding of writing as a social act, and must be treated as such in all contexts, from professional to student writing.
Chapter 1: “Preliminary Definitions of the Network” will introduce the project by examining current scholarship on networked writing and the ways this research fits into discussions of literacy, especially as it pertains to issues of authorship and the construction of identity. This chapter will draw specifically from the work of Gregory Ulmer and his theory of electracy as well as Stuart Selber’s tripartite definition of computer literacy. The attendant survey of scholarship will center on theories developed by Jill Walker, Collin Brooke, Marcel O’Gorman, Duncan Watts, David Weinberger, and Deborah Brandt.
Chapter 2: “The Writers that Won’t Be Still: Constructing a Method to Examine Networked Writers” will forge a multiple methodology as a basis for the study, drawing from sociology scholars such as Bruno Latour and Mark Granovetter, network studies research like that of Strogatz and Watts, and traditional analytical methods from composition and rhetoric such as content analysis in the style of Thomas Huckin. This chapter will also consider Ulmer’s method of heuretics and methodologies constructed for recent scholarship on weblogs, such as that of Clancy Ratliff, Susan Herring, and Clay Shirky.
Chapter 3: “Following the Traces, Naming the Trends.” This chapter will narrate the course of the data collection as I examine and analyze the weblogs. I’ll discuss the emergence of codes and initial patterns, including examples of each, and offer the preliminary findings of the project.
Chapter 4: “What is Network Literacy?” will speak to the findings of the study, (re)situating the patterns of findings within the discussion of network studies and Stuart Selber’s framework for understanding digital literacies. This chapter will offer implications for roles of the author/reader and attempt to define network literacy as it applies to writer/participants in Web 2.0.
Chapter 5: “Network Literacy and the Writing Classroom” will address the context of the writing classroom. The theory of network literacy developed in this dissertation seeks to complicate and clarify prior scholarship of digital and visual literacies as defined by scholars such as Anne Wysocki, Cynthia Selfe, Gail Hawisher, Richard Selfe, Cynthia Haynes, Eric Crump, and Richard Lanham. The dissertation will end with speculation about how the classroom might be re-imagined in light of network literacy as this project defines it.

Works Cited
Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. New York: Plume, 2003.
Barthes, Roland. “Authors and Writers.” A Barthes Reader.
Brooke, Collin. Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media. Forthcoming.
---. Rhetworks: An Introduction to the Study of Discursive Networks. 1 Feb. 2007 .
Granovetter, Mark. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” American Journal of Sociology 78 (1973): 1360-1380.
Herring, Susan et al. "Bridging the gap: a genre analysis of weblogs." Proc. of the 37th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 5-8 January 2004, Big Island, Hawaii. Los Alamitos: IEEE Press, 2004. Apr. 10 2007 < http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jpd/classes/ics234cw04/herring.pdf>.
Hochman, David. “Mommy (and Me).” 30 Jan. 2005. New York Times Online. 26 Oct. 2006 .
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.
Lawrence, Jen. “The Politics of Blogging.” 29 Jan. 2005. MUBAR (Mothered Up Beyond All Recognition). 26 Oct. 2006 .
O’Gorman, Marcel. E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006.
O’Reilly, Tim. “What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.” 30 Sept. 2005. O’Reilly.com 1 Oct 2006 .
Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.
Selber, Stuart. Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2004.
Shirky, Clay. "Power Laws, Weblogs and Inequality." Exposure: From Friction to Freedom. Helsinki, Finland: Aula, 2003.
Rice, Jeff. “Networks and New Media.” College English 69.2 (2006): 127-133.
Walker, Jill. “Talk at Brown.” jill/txt. 5 Dec. 2003. 9 Apr. 2007 < http://huminf.uib.no/~jill/archives/blog_theorising/talk_at_brown.html>.

Watts, Duncan. Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. New York: Norton, 2003.

Extended Provisional Bibliography

Anderson, Chris. The Long Tail. New York: Hyperion, 2006.

Barabási, Albert-László. Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means. New York: Plume, 2003.

Barthes, Roland. “Authors and Writers.” A Barthes Reader.

Bebar, Ruth and Deborah Gordon, eds. Women Writing Culture. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1995.

Blair, Kristine and Pamela Takayoshi, eds. Feminist Cyberscapes: Mapping Gendered Academic Spaces. Stamford: Ablex, 1999.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.

Chapman, Michael and Roger Dixon, eds. Meaning and the Growth of Understanding. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1997.

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[Disclosure: sorry for the length of this. It turned into a generative mess. My initial press for posting this was to work out the way social presence works into network literacy. It didn't quite work out that way.]

I'm finishing my paper for the Computer Connection at Cs next week, whose title is "Cultivating Social Presence in the Computer-mediated Classroom."

When I worked up this abstract, it essentially was the skeleton of a very quick, very informal presentation that I made at a WP professional development mini-seminar for online teaching a few months back. The gist of my original presentation drew heavily from my MA thesis findings as well as some interesting research I came across by Terry Anderson, who studies distance education at Athabasca University in Edmonton.

My thesis, put simply, examined online writing conference transcripts. I found that writers' perceived "comfort" with the online medium could be linked directly to a few simple rhetorical moves on the tutor's part (I was also the tutor). For instance, when the writer and I engaged in seemingly off-topic banter at the front end of the "real" conference, the writer reported a higher comfort-level. For example, one conference began with me saying something about the Phantom of the Opera (I think I'd been listening to the soundtrack at the time), and the writer happened to be a fan, and we talked for a moment about the story and the show and etc. Another writer and I talked about our kids at the front end of the conference.

I couched my thesis findings tentatively, knowing that my study was limited and fraught with chinks (all but one of my subjects were women, for instance), but I am still convinced that there is some truth to my conclusions. Anderson's work, which is far more thorough and rigorous than my research, supports my own findings, and his methods and texts are similar. He uses textual analysis and coding to describe the rhetorical (my word, not his) moves of students and teachers in online classroom discussions to measure "social presence" and comes up with a "social presence density calculator." The higher, or more dense, the social presence in an online classroom, the more "effective" the interactions that take place in that classroom. (Effectiveness is measured primarily in terms of student satisfaction with the course, but also in assessment of student work by the teacher.)

To measure social presence density, Anderson worked up a list of rhetorical moves that students and teachers made, such as "self-disclosure," "use of humor," and "expression of emotion." A higher incidence of these particular moves resulted in a higher social presence density.

What Anderson doesn't explicitly say, though, is *how* to increase these sorts of rhetorical moves by and among the students. My argument is that the teacher must stick her neck out and approach the computer-mediated classroom with an explicit social presence rhetoric. That is, in order to create social presence in an online classroom, teachers must, to an extent, leave aside the clinical, dare-I-say stuffy, positioning that is sometimes comfortable and safe for teachers.

I've found a few other studies about online teaching that deal directly with social presence (none about specifically teaching writing + social presence yet, though). My task now is to work up a preliminary list of practices that writing teachers can use to up that social presence factor (my impression of the Computer Connection is that "practical application" is important).

In sleuthing around to find people talking about social presence [which at one point involved digging through cgb's del.icio.us posts] , I came across this presentation from lift07 by Stowe Boyd where he argues that for anything (he's talking applications, which I am trying to transfer to classroom practices for the presentation) to be successfully social, it must begin with an individual's interests/passions. That is, the social begins with individuals first. Individuals must be invested, somehow, to build the social, to connect herself, to participate in the network.

For the writing classroom, I think the implications of this theory are a bit controversial: for social presence to emerge in an online writing classroom, each individual must self-select to become a part of the community. The self-select that happens when a student signs up for a compulsory FY comp class is something different, I think, unless the FY comp course is topics-based (like Ohio State's FY comp courses in the humanities--available only to honors/AP students, incidentally) and the students choose based on interest that way. So right off the bat, our students are put into a place where the social is forced.

[BTW--here might be the connections to diss work: networked writers construct social presence that in turn constructs the network in a kind of serendipitous fashion...hm, that's going somewhere, I think, but not quite sure yet. At any rate, "social presence" is definitely part of network literacy. And it has something do to with the individual, and connections, and I don't know yet.]

So, it is the teacher's responsibility to construct some kind of investment in the student. Yes, I am saying that the teacher has to make the student CARE about the class and the other students. And to an extent, this is no different than what some might argue needs to happen in the IRL classroom. And I think I might also find teachers who eschew this "creating interest" responsibility as well. And I think we know who the more successful teachers are? Stop me if I'm assuming too much there.

But in an online space, to cultivate interest might be considered more crucial. That is, the IRL classroom enjoys the benefit of certain cultural behaviors that compel students to work and participate, like the perceived embarrassement for not turning work in on time. In an online space, this embarrassment isn't creating the compulsion to, say, do the reading for a discussion because social immediacy and intimacy are lacking.

What can we do to supplant social immediacy and intimacy? How can we cultivate spaces where students will feel comfortable [problematic term] enough to perform and participate with other students and the teacher to get the most out of the interactions? Essentially, how can we make them care or be interested?

So, here's how I'm answering this question: We can make them be interested in us, the teachers. We can make them care about us. As I write this, I know this claim is fraught with problems. But I think it makes sense, to a degree. All that business about "self-disclosure" and "humor" and "expression of emotion" as creating social presence density began with a teacher who self-disclosed, made jokes, and expressed emotion.

As teachers of writing and rhetoric, we are especially good at wooing audiences, at constructing ethos, at using the language for eliciting particular responses. The problem might be that such rhetorical moves (self-disclosure, emotion, humor) are also seen, especially in academic writing, as weaknesses or as unprofessional. These rhetorical moves are essentially the MOST important in the network of writers that I'm studying for the diss. But to try and transfer those rhetorical moves into the classroom for use by the teacher to foster interest, to construct community, might actually backfire. Hm.

At any rate, I talked myself into that corner about the backfire just now. It's not in my Cs paper (yet). What is in the Cs paper is the practical ways we might cultivate social presence for the classroom, which I think is simply a matter of letting your students really know you, or really know a constructed you, that they can care about. And so this involves working up an initial activity that requires them to talk about themselves somehow, in which you the teacher also participates. Consider using a synchronous communication app, like IM or IRC, to meet with small groups of them regularly, and situate those discussions in the most informal way possible. Think a little more carefully about your marginalia and end comments on papers. Consider keeping a course blog (if your course lives on Blackboard or WebCT) where you can reflect and synthesize (again, informally) what you see going on in the IM discussions and in the students' individual work so the students can see how their work lines up with what other students are doing and saying. Consider (and this last one will raise hackles, but I mean it) keeping a personal blog where you write about your cats specifically with your student audience in mind. This last one might appear to be "overboard," but if we consider the ways in which our personal lives come through in the conventional classroom, it really isn't as farfetched as it initially seems.

It's not what you use. It's not spending days and weeks teaching yourself involved, cutting-edge apps. It's not using Twitter, or podcasting, or putting lectures up on YouTube (though it can be all of that, too). What it IS, what cultivating social presence is, is bringing the personal and the human to the online spaces that the classroom inhabits.

As I finish this, I realize there's another scary claim I'm making here: teaching online requires a nurturing teacherly stance and cannot, for the most part, support an agonistic stance. And that might catch me some flack, too. But I'm going to go with it.

Hubs and Connectors: Barabasi found that his work with the network of the World Wide Web did not always lend itself neatly to the combined small-world model/random graph theory that Watts and Strogatz developed. That is, the mathematics that drives the small-word/random graph theory constructs (or assumes) “a deeply egalitarian society, whose links are ruled by the throw of a dice” (Barabasi 54). In stark contrast, Barabasi’s research explodes the commonly held notion that the Web as a network is highly democratic. Essentially, Barabasi claims that the Web is NOT classless: “[t]he most intriguing result of our Web-mapping project was the complete absence of democracy, fairness, and egalitarian values on the Web” (56). Essentially, the Web is made up of a handful of “connectors,” which are exceptionally well-connected by countless incoming links, and an innumerable number of nodes that garner only a handful of incoming links. This fits nicely in with Pareto’s Law or the 80/20 rule, since 80 percent of the links on the Web only go to 15 percent of the pages (66).

But I can't find my _Language and Symbolic Power_ to save my life. Ugh. I must have ferreted it away... so I'll have to work from memory. But back to Putnam first.* He traces the first use of the phrase "social capital" to a man from, where else, good old West Virginia. This guy, L.J. Hanifan (state supervisor of rural schools at the time--1916) argued that connections and cooperationbetween neighbors might improve inividual students' chances at succeeding in school. Apparently, then, a whole slew of other scholars, in fields such as economics and sociology, took up the term independently at different parts of the 19th Century (Putnam 19).

What strikes me, here, when I consider social capital within the context network literacy, is that I have the inclination to somehow attribute network literacy to the explicit understanding and use of social capital. That is, much in the same way Bourdieu's work meant to uncover the unspoken structures in culture that dictated who has power and how that power is enacted, I'm driven to think about network literacy as being directly related to--or the result of--similar understanding about social capital, for instance: who *has* social capital, how it works, how it might be cultivated and maintained.

An easy example of the overt understanding of social capital might be the ways in which bloggers learn quickly that in order to get readers, a blogger must first be a reader and responder himself, making connections outward by leaving comments and trackbacks to other bloggers.

The problem with looking at network literacy simply as a function of one's ability to gauge and create social capital is that it reduces network literacy to what Selber (and Banks) would call "functional literacy." In other words, saying network literacy is simply social literacy via internet and software connections ignores those meta-moves that users make, doesn't allow for users to subvert conventions of social literacy, to make changes to the conventions, or to understand (and manipulate) the ways in which their actions shape and inform the network itself (these latter understandings might be filed under Selber's "critical literacy").

On the other hand, to understand and use essentially unacknowledged-yet-firmly-entrenched conventions indicates that a meta-understanding...

But not always, especially if we look at network operations in terms of symbolic power, in that understanding and using conventions doesn't always involve the ability to "buck the groove" as it were.

*sigh* I think this constitutes a paragraph. I have to go make pie.

*should have put this in the last post
Putnam, Robert D. _Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community._ New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.

This project will draw on texts that involve research in network studies, which emerges from disciplines ranging from anthropology, social science, and information science. Also, I’ll draw heavily from the field of rhetoric and technology, specifically those scholars and texts that deal with technology and literacy.

Key Terms:

Social capital: In Putnam: “I’ll do for you if you do for me” (20). See also reciprocity. Putnam offers two levels of social capital: bonding social capital, which creates exclusivity; and bridging social capital, which connects outward or creates inclusivity (22). Bonding social capital is created by “homogenous groups” such as ethnic fraternities or country clubs (22). Bridging connections “are outward looking and encompass people across diverse social cleavages” like the civil rights movement (22). “To build bridging social capital requires that we transcend our social and political and professional identities to connect with people unlike ourselves” (411). “No sector of American society will have more influence on the future state of our social capital than the electronic mass media and especially the Internet…Let us foster new forms of electronic entertainment and communication that reinforce community rather than forestalling it” (410). Putnam’s concern is that “virtual community” is not as good as “real” or “face-to-face” community. His call is for us as a nation to return to making the civic connections of yesteryear, but that we must find ways that Internet technology can support the rebuilding of conventional communities (“place-based, face-to-face, enduring social networks” [411]) rather than replace them. Putnam would be pleased to find that blogging has already fostered these sorts of conventional networks. For instance BlogHer, originally a multi-authored Typepad blog [include history here from Elisa’s response], has evolved into a sizeable community of women writers who attend the yearly Blogher conference. The BlogHer conference is as much about seminars about feminism and workshops on using Photoshop as it is about reinforcing the virtual into the place-based. Another example of blog networks evolving (or succumbing?) to IRL meetings is that of the Chicago RBFers. The RBF (or “Running Blog Family”) is supported by completerunning.com, a site dedicated to issues of running and racing. Any blogger can join request his blog be added to the list (which numbers 1023 at the time of this writing). In the summer of 2006, a group of RBFers based in Chicago began monthly meet-ups at local eateries.

In order to develop a network theory that allows us to describe networked writers and to think about how writers behave in highly connected environments, my initial work will be to narrow my subject-pool from the dangerously nebulous (and highly innumerable) “mommy-bloggers” into a field more approachable. In order to do so, I will be borrowing from social net work theory its data collection tools, as well as the small-world network model as described by Duncan Watts in Six Degrees. Each of these systems provides me with vocabulary to position mom blogs in relation to one another, and allow me to ground my subject pool selection on substantial network models rather than random searches.

Social network theory assumes that “small scale interaction becomes translated into large scale patterns” (Granovetter 1360) [better thumbnail here, from someone other than Granovetter], and provides a framework for me to narrow the subject pool. Granovetter, sociologist at Stanford and author of “The Strength of Weak Ties,” posits that “strong [interpersonal] ties” can be measured by “a…combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and…reciprocal services” (1361). Further, “mutual choice” can also be an indicator of a “strong tie” (1364). Clearly, the nature of the blog as a computer-mediated communication tool allows writers to develop these strong ties as Granovetter describes them; however, in trying to compile a useable collection of texts to study, to begin the kind of close textual analysis necessary to, for instance, determine whether “mutual confiding” exists would be prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, I plan to initially use only two of Granovetter’s strong tie gauges; this will preserve the integrity of the assembly by assuring those blogs that remain in the subject pool are indeed highly connected to one another. Additionally, it will allow me to save the actual content analysis (more on that later) for once I’ve settled on a collection of writers for the study.

The two components from social network theory I’ll apply in assembling the collection of blogs are “reciprocal services” and “mutual choices.” One function of blogs is that writers are able to, and often do, link in two directions. Writers can post outward links to other writers; that is, in a blog entry or on the main index (front page) of the site, the blogger can create a direct path to another blogger that readers can easily follow by “clicking through.” Most often these outbound links appear in a semi-static “blogroll” or list of bloggers the writer endorses or reads regularly. In addition, some blog applications afford the added dimension of “trackbacks” or incoming links, where a blogger can essentially post a link to her own blog on someone else’s site. Bloggers often do this when they want to respond (on their own site) to what another writer has posted, and the trackback provides a link to that response.

These linking practices provide a map for me to trace the ways in which bloggers self-select in connecting to one another. That is, bloggers sometimes will construct and maintain their blogrolls based on who is linking to them. In other words, a link can be seen as a gesture of appreciation: “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” At the same time, however, links also operate in a more conventional manner, where many bloggers link to the same popular writers, who often do not use blogrolls or post many outbound links. Through Technorati (technorati.com), a service that tracks the links between blogs, I can search for blogs that self-describe using tags like “motherhood” or “parenting” and then rank them based on their “authority” or number of incoming links.

Once I gather the list of most popular mom blogs, I’ll begin to work through them to find the highest ranking of the group that also publishes a weblog, and this blog will serve as the starting point for the compilation of my pool. I will not begin with the most-linked blog (the search consistently returns Heather Armstrong’s dooce.com) because it has no semi-static list of outbound links. Therefore, while dooce certainly exhibits a “mutual choice” that other bloggers make, Armstrong does not offer the “reciprocal services” in terms of linking back to her readers. I cannot begin with her blog and follow her links to describe a small-world network; beginning with dooce would not produce a network with a significant “clustering coefficient” (Watts 77). In other words, while Armstrong’s blog might be heavily connected, those connections are, for the most part, only running in one direction: towards her. Though dooce is a hub with over 5,000 other bloggers providing links in, it doesn’t provide those readers with ways of connecting with or between one another.

The blog with the most incoming links as well as a public blogroll is Her Bad Mother, written by a university instructor based in Toronto. From here, I’ll copy and paste the titles of those blogs into a word-processing document. Then, I’ll follow the first link on her blogroll, and copy and paste the titles from that blogroll into the same document. I’ll return to Her Bad Mother, and follow the second link, copying and pasting the blogroll from that blog into the same document. This will continue until I have compiled a list of all the blogs with outgoing links (once removed) from the most linked-to blog.
Once the list is complete, I’ll use a spreadsheet to organize (probably by alphabetical order), count, and select the blogs I’ll include in the pool. Those blogs that appear the most will [or there might be some great mathematical formula, where I calculate the total number of initial blogs (nor repeats) in proportion to the largest number of repeats to decided how many blogs I’ll actually end up with for the pool itself…]

Actor-Network-Theory, Content Analysis, and Map Analysis
Once the subject pool is collected, I’ll approach the blogs-as-texts by drawing heavily from Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT) as a driving theoretical methodology and by relying on content analysis for the systematic material coding of the blog posts. ANT requires that I approach my texts as performative traces of action—action which is the result of a network of people, objects, and ideas informing (or constitutes) a particular actor (here, a particular blogger); the blogger not only acts within the network but also as a product of the network (Latour 46). Further, ANT requires the researcher to allow the vocabulary of the actors be louder than that of the researcher; that is, “the concepts of the actors are allowed to be stronger than that of the analysts” (30).

[Must use content + map analysis so that I can not only characterize concepts but also trace their movement from one writer to another. Content analysis by itself does not specify movement or dynamism among or within the texts; it assumes texts are static and does not account for intertextuality...]

However.

While I am excited about ANT, how I think that the ideas that drive it are compelling and important to a construction of a networked-writers theory, I'm afraid that I can't use ANT.

Here's why. It's in the problem of groups. ANT has a problem with groups; specifically, it has a problem with externally-defined groups. Latour explains that in the naming or formation of groups, sociologists make the mistake of discrediting or ignoring that which may be part of that group or that which the group itself might include or exclude. Essentially, groups aren't what exist, it's their traces or their actions that do, and therefore the group only exists as long as a specific action happens. When the action ceases, the group is gone as well. Therefore, the business of ANT is to “follow the actors’ own ways and begin [with] the traces left behind by their activity of forming and dismantling groups” (29).

The trouble I have with this is that I am right now working to delimit the "group" or subject pool of my study. I am doing what Latour warns us against:

…the central intuition of sociology [is] that at any given moment actors are made to fit in a group—often more than one…they [sociologists] never seem to tire in designating one entity as real, solid, proven, or entrenched while others are … artificial, imaginary, transitional, illusory…(28)

In doing so, I get to pick "which grouping is preferable to start a social inquiry" (28); therefore, I am committing sin #1: Ordering stuff into neat boxes. Privileging certain connections over others. Pretending that "social" is the stuff that makes those groups stick together and not the shifting associations that appear and disappear between and among people, objects, and ideas.

There might be a way around this, though. If there was a way that I could argue that the "traces" left behind by bloggers were an indication of their own grouping--that is, I can argue that the texts are those of "spokespeople" who, by linking to others in blogrolls, are constructing the groups themselves.

Further, I can engage in the recent discussion about which writers declared themselves to be "mommy-bloggers" and those who explicitly eschewed that title.

Second, whenever some work has to be done to trace or retrace the boundary of a group, other groupings are designated as being empty, archaic, dangerous, obsolete, and so on. It is always by comparison with other competing ties that any tie is emphasized. So for every group to be defined, a list of anti-groups is set up as well. (32)

I'm not sure if such strategies on my part would be sufficient, however, if i were to claim to be deploying ANT as a method. As I talk through it, it kind of sounds as though I'm forcing things to fit. *sigh*

I'm reading the whole thing. Here's why: Latour is a riot to read. For instance, he distinguishes between agency and figuration to show us that it is important to see how the ways in which we name actions (or the ways we figure them) does not take away from who (or what) is actually performing the action. ANT works to break from 'figurative sociology' (54) by using the term "actant" (54) so that anyTHING that spurs action is equal in its considerability.

Oh, I got away from myself. I started out wanting to show you a passage that explains why I'm having such a good time with Latour. In describing what figuration is, Latour explains, "To say 'culture forbids having kids out of wedlock' requires, in terms of figuration, exactly as much work as saying 'my future mother-in-law wants me to marry her daughter" (53). He's good with the examples.

And he's also good with the directives: "Recording not filtering out, describing not disciplining, these are the Laws and the Prophets" (55).

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.

However.

What I meant to write about was a post from lovely Larry Lessig, who wrangles through a discussion of how to connect our great-and-fabulous quid pro quo economy with what he calls the "second economy," the one in which goods, services, and ideas are exchanged but not with profit or return as the motivation.

A commentor tells Lessig this second economy might be called a "gift economy."

With my socialist/anarchist/communist leanings, I'm faintly familiar with gift economies. The reason I bring it up here, though, is that in trying to describe writers' networks, the word "economy" will probably be useful, as part of what I'll talk about is the exchange of "stuff": words, primarily, and ideas, of course. Which way are the ideas running? Which lines of the networks (which edges?) are these ideas flowing through? From whom to whom?

A writers' network, especially one existing on/through social software, is an economy; it exists because of the exchange--it is the exchange. And it is an exchange made of uneven and/or unexpected reciprocities, where often the "giver" often "gives" without expectation.

I expect to use the "network as (gift) economy" more fully after I find more sources. (Got any ideas?) The commentor to Lessig's post offers Lewis Hyde’s The Gift as one possible refernce, though he adds it's "not very hard-edged," which makes me wonder whether he's refering to a lack of academic rigor or to the author's inability to commit to the ideology of the concept.

At any rate, another possible discussion for the project.

The method for compiling and then selecting blogs for the project goes thusly (and was a gift from Collin): I began at Technorati's 100 most popular blogs. I worked my way down the list until I found the (at the time) highest ranking blog with a blogroll--most of those blogs listed on the Technorati top 100 do not publish/offer blogrolls. That highest ranking blog was Joho. I then began to follow the links to each of the sites on his blogroll, and copy/pasted their blogroll from that site into a Word doc.

I will continue to do this--for how long, I'm not sure--and when I have generated a list long enough (again, what's that look like? I don't know yet), I'll alphabetize the list and choose from those blogs that are the "most connected." Right now I've got B working on helping me (another gift) by importing the list into both Excel and Minitab, which count duplicates and does statistics stuff. We're just futzing with it now--I don't plan to be done with this step for another week or more.

I'm hoping that this will be a rigorous enough method for limiting the pool and for selecting the most "connected" writers. I've got a few concerns, though. The first is that right now, most of who is coming up--understandably so, considering that I started with Joho--are bloggers who are blogging ABOUT networks, connectivity, social software, social structures, etc. It seems like if I end up with a subject pool who take up the very discussion I'm working to engage, things will all get a little too "meta" for me. That is, it might be too difficult to orchestrate my discussion as separate from theirs. (?)

To remedy this, I'll probably construct at least one more potential subject pool that begins from a different blogger--one who is decidedly not part of the extended Joho network.

But I feel like I'm up against problems with this. This process seems a bit scattershot. I'm trying to figure out if there is a way to begin from a "pure" place--a blogroll on a blog that is more certainly a central node.

Ah. What I should do is conduct the first subject pool centrality survey, and then take the most-linked blog from that initial list as my starting point, and from there generate the list from which I'll select the blogs for the network/rhetorical analysis...

Except really, that is what Technorati did for me in the first place. So. *sigh*.

I just feel like I need to be using a method or formula that is extensive and clinical-sounding, like eigenvector centrality. Of course, I go cross-eyed trying to understand all the "if this...let such-and-so be this..." But I'm pretty sure if I found someone who did understand all those lambdas to help me (that would, of course be another gift), I could make it work.

Next: the real reason I titled this entry "gift economies." It wasn't originally going to be about all the help I'm getting on this diss. But the post is too far gone at this point to try to recover my original purpose; I'll blog that tomorrow.