Picturing life when languaging fails
In my English 301 class, I’ve been teaching about blogging as a social action, and we read a cool piece of scholarship that theorizes why bloggers blog. What do they get out of it? How is the whacked-out genre of personal diary expressed to the world functioning in the lives of the millions of people who read and write weblogs? The scholars talk about what blogs do: they use new technology and the urgency of the cultural moment to work on an age-old human need. They say blogs make space for the dual project of self-expression and participation in community. So blogs attend to the age of project of defining the self. That makes sense to me.
I’ve been using pictures of my cats to language my life. And sometimes words fail. As I said below.
Emma’s blog says it for me.
Tags: blogging, fire, genre, images, language
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February 3, 2008 at 3:35 pm
I tried to paste a picture of Kalliope here, in lieu of my own words…but my computerese is deficient. What kind of self are you seeking in your own blogging?
February 3, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I like this explanation of blogging. It makes the clearest and simplest sense.
What is this picture of a fire? I wish you could make it so that when you click on the picture, it gets bigger.
February 3, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Dahliani asks “What kind of self are you seeking in your own blogging?”
What I’ve experienced, and what Miller and Shepherd say, is that blogging is not a reflection of the self that already is, one that I seek to communicate. The self gets constructed in the act of writing.
And isn’t that exactly what language scholars are saying about social construction? The “conduit metaphor” for communication fails. There is no true, objective, “real” self or meaning that precedes language. Words are not the conduit or path that transmits meaning. Language creates meaning.
Miller and Shepherd say that because the new technology of blogs allows the dual work on personal and public, that blogging is a self-in-creation in the act of doing it. (They also say that it is an attempt to mitigate the postmodern identity of fragmented self–this happens, they theorize, by the very fact that the blog brings into being a sense of a coherent self that is known only once it is written.)
February 3, 2008 at 9:08 pm
LaRae asks about the fire picture. It’s Kona Village burning. Check out Emma’s blog that I link to and you’ll see the connection.
February 5, 2008 at 7:09 am
I love the pictures of your cats, especially the pumpkin pie eater
So why, specifically, do you blog? Is it partly an escape from the daily grind of scholarly life?