Blogs Revisited

Looking back at my first blog post, at the beginning of the quarter, I mostly thought that bloggers were self-absorbed people with too much time on their hands who spend all day writing about their trip to the mall or lame things like that. While there still are lots of blogs like that, this quarter I learned about the varieties of different ways that people can express themselves through blogs. I didn’t know that blogs were being used for journalism, education, and political means – I had always thought that they were a personal thing. The more I learned about blogs, the more interesting they became to me and I saw that there were actually a lot of blogs out there that would be worthwhile to keep up with. Another thing I learned was that it’s hard to define what a blog really is – whether it’s an online journal, a form of journalism, or academic writing. The articles I read that attempted to define blogs always failed miserably, so I’m going to spare myself the embarrassment. All I can say on that is that a blog is whatever the person who is blogging wants it to be.

After learning all of this about the merits and diversity of blogs, I can also say I’m not really sure if they’re for me. I mean, maybe I will read blogs, but I don’t think I’m meant to be a blog writer. I wasn’t very good at all about keeping my blog updated – for me it was kind of like the journals in elementary school that I would start and then forget about two weeks later. In retrospect, it would have been really cool to have kept those journals as a kid, but I just never was up to maintaining them.

I think that blogs can be a useful tool in academia. The Educause article on educational blogging that I read for an earlier blog assignment contained some doubts about whether blogs in response to an assignment were really blogs or just fell flat because they weren’t real expressions by the authors. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Yes, we’re probably not going to be as perfectly candid in a blog as we are with our friends in person, but that just means that we’re considering our audience. Our audience for the blogs in the class consists not only of Christine, but also of pretty much everyone in the world who has internet access and who might stumble across our pages. I am definitely not going to be as candid in a blog for the world to see as I am with friends. I also think that the blogs are useful for class because it lets everyone see what everyone else is writing and what they are interested in. Otherwise, it’s not much different from having everyone write a reading response and turning it in to the teacher. The difference with blogs is that we can all see each others’ responses (and respond to them if we so choose). While it may not always happen that everyone has time to read other peoples’ blogs, at least there is that option.

In terms of a collaborative blog, I think that might be more trouble than it is worth. On the one hand, it might be cool to have all of our thoughts compiled in one place. On the other hand, what is nice about blogging is that it is usually a space just for your thoughts. Having to work with other people to negotiate a shared blog might be frustrating, and it might end up seeming more like a chat board with different posters and less like a personal blog.

Overall, I think having the blog for this class was a good idea and was a good way to have reading response, but I might have made it more compulsory to read other people’s blogs (maybe make three responses required), so at least you have to see what they’re all up to.

Persuasive Gaming

I never really play shoot-em-up violent video games, so it was hard for me to really picture what the creators of Velvet Strike were trying to do based on the salon.com article “The Velvet Strike Underground.” From what I can get, it seems like players can download anti-war “sprays” and spray them on the wall while playing Counter Strike. At first I didn’t get what the point of this would be – clearly if a person has gone to the lengths of downloading and spraying these anti-war messages, then they are already anti-war, so who cares if their version of the game has graffiti everywhere. Then I remembered how my brother would always keep me off the computer because he was playing online with other people (and so he couldn’t ditch out on them, he said) – I realized that it was a protest because the other gamers online would see their sprays. Duh! Sometimes even I, a supposedly tech savvy young person, forget that people do everything online now, even kill people (virtually, that is).

That confusion over with, I don’t know if I think Velvet Strike is a super effective idea. I don’t think graffiti is ever really effective in convincing people to change their minds on something – it usually just seems like a form of expression for the person who is actually spraying. But maybe this isn’t meant to make people change their minds – maybe it’s just meant to force them to be aware. Having protesters spraying peace slogans (and hopscotch boards) on the walls forces gamers to be aware at least that they are viewing political content in games.

One gamer is quoted in the article as saying: “I don't know why you feel the need to tie my beloved video game into this, but it's pretty low. It makes me sad to think that there may not be one thing in this world that someone hasn't already tied their political bullshit to.” What he doesn’t realize is that he is already seeing “political bullshit” when he goes around murdering Arabs in video games like Counter-Strike. General effects of violent video games aside, he is already being made to see Arabs as targets and “the bad guys.” So, in that sense, whether or not the sprays will change anyone’s mind, at least it is making them aware. They are being fed politics through the act of just playing shoot em up games with Arabs as targets, whether they are resentful of being made aware of it or not.

Wikis

From the Guardian article “Common Knowledge”:

“What makes the Wikipedia so compelling - and this article so hard to finish - is the way everything is so massively linked. You read one entry, and before you know it, you're reading up on Anne Boleyn or Italian greyhounds.”

This reminded me of the article we read at the very beginning of the quarter complaining about how the internet allows for such narrow searches that we never explore beyond the specifics of what exactly we are looking for. I remember in class we talked about how wrong he was because no matter what you are looking for on the web, there are always links to distract you. Each link might lead you only to something slightly different from the original page, but over time you can get to topics so far removed from the original topic that you wonder how you ended up there.

After browsing around the wikipedia.com site (for way longer than I could really afford, with all of the other work I’m supposed to be doing), one of the coolest/most addicting things I found was that everything was linked. As the Guardian article talks about, apparently it is really easy to link words as you are writing (making WikiWords). If there’s anything that we don’t need to worry about at all, it is that internet is going to keep us from exploring off-topic subjects. I started browsing by looking at the definition for differential equations and I ended up at the page for a manga published in Japan called Love Hina.

On the one hand, it was kind of neat just to surf around and find things that I didn’t even know I would have looked for. On the other hand, I didn’t read a single article all the way through in the entire time that I was surfing because I always clicked on a WikiWord before I was done with the page I was looking at. Maybe that’s just me and my short attention span, but somehow I think other people have had similar experiences. So it seems like Wikipedias can be an amazing tool for information but also for procrastination and jumbled information. Not that the information on Wikipedia itself is jumbled, it just became jumbled in my brain as each page I started to (but didn’t finish) reading bled into the next.

Blogging and Online Communication

This blog is commenting on Stephen Downs’ article, “Educational Blogging.” First of all, for someone who claims to understand an online form of communication like blogging, the article was way too frikkin’ long to be on just one page. If I weren’t reading it for a class, I would not have read it all the way through. Just looking at the scroll bar on the right hand side of the page was discouraging – at one point I noticed I had been reading for 10 minutes and wasn’t even a quarter of the way down. If I were him, I would have broken it up into several shorter pages, with better differentiation between the different aspects of blogs he was addressing rather than just including all of his huge amounts of information in one page and no format.

Anyway, aside from the formatting of the page, there were some interesting points in the article. One thing I noticed was his assertion that “the definitions of blogging offered by bloggers, as opposed to those offered by external commentators, follow this theme. Blogging is something defined by format and process, not by content.” Throughout this part of the article, he seems to be saying that no matter whether you are an 15 year-old writing about your crushes at school or a 45 year-old writing about the war in Iraq, the essence of a blog is commentary. That commentary can be on your friends, someone else’s blog, political events, or just your own life.

Later, he seems to confine this statement to say that blogging is only about response to reading what you’re interested in:

"Despite obvious appearances, blogging isn’t really about writing at all; that’s just the end point of the process, the outcome that occurs more or less naturally if everything else has been done right. Blogging is about, first, reading. But more important, it is about reading what is of interest to you: your culture, your community, your ideas. And it is about engaging with the content and with the authors of what you have read—reflecting, criticizing, questioning, reacting. If a student has nothing to blog about, it is not because he or she has nothing to write about or has a boring life. It is because the student has not yet stretched out to the larger world, has not yet learned to meaningfully engage in a community."

This really narrows his earlier definition. Now he is saying blogging is about reading something and responding, creating an engaged community of bloggers. I wouldn’t necessarily agree. What about people who are just keeping online journals? Those are blogs, too, even if they are responding to nothing but the author’s own life. You don’t have to read blogs to write blogs. You don’t have to read anything to write blogs. I think that blogs can be just as much about writing and expressing as they can be about commenting. Most of these articles that we’ve read which have attempted to define blogs just seem to narrow down the possibilities – blogs can be any number of things and it seems like the more people try to put their finger on the “essence” of blogging, the more they sound like they’re spewing a lot of bs.

4/25 Class Warmup Blog

According to my timeline, by this week I should have done most of my research and taken notes on my sources. Now I should be starting to make a thesis and do an outline. However, sometimes real life intervenes. A friend of mine has been in the hospital, so between that and catching up from all the time I missed for rugby, I haven't really had time to do all of the research I should have been doing. Now things are a little more settled, so I should have some time to get more research done and get things moving.

Oral Presentation

To be honest, I did my presentation slides and outline before reading the Lunsford article. So I wouldn't say that my presentation was informed it. The article made enough sense, but it pretty much had the general advice that people always give about oral presentations (consider who your audience is, try to catch their attention, repeat yourself, use clear visuals, practice, etc. etc.).

In terms of my presentation today, the #1 thing I'm worried about is going over time. I practiced a couple of times, and I came in between 2:55 and 3:42 on different times, just depending on how long I took on each topic before moving on. It's sometimes hard to figure out how long you've been standing up there when you're giving a presentation! Oh well, I'll just try to move briskly through everything and hope I get done in time.

I've also been thinking about whether or not I spent too much time on the introduction and not enough time elaborating on my research. I like my intro because I think it's interesting and will get people to pay attention, but I'm not sure if all of it is completely necessary for the presentation - I could have spent more time elaborating on the topic.

I was also considering whether I stuck too closely to the format of my written proposal. I did stick to the same sequence, but I made an effort to translate it into oral and visual rhetoric rather than written. But it's not anything incredibly new and original, like some of the things mentioned on the course website (movie trailer, expose, etc.). I think it gets the point across, though.

I think that my Powerpoint slides should be helpful and keep everyone's attention. That's what I spent the majority of my time working on for the presentation. I had to wade through a lot of pictures to find ones that worked. Not to mention worrying about size and picture quality. I also learned how to use this cool program that Macs have called "Grab," which makes it really easy to take a screenshot (that's how I did all the images of the Google pages).

Well, we'll see how it goes.

4/4 Class Warmup Blog

Dibbel writes: "It gives me no small satisfaction to think that the system of centralized, limited-access publishing that instilled that fear in me will be dwarfed into irrelevance by a wide-open system that, via Usenet alone, already publishes the equivalent of 1000 books a day."

While I agree with his message that the internet is changing the way we view authorship, I don't completely agree with the statement that cyberspace authorship will dwarf traditional, published varieties. The internet is great because it gives us so much information, but at the same time we often have no idea who is at the other end of a post or a webpage. There is often no way to hold that author accountable or view his or her credentials. Part of what is appealing about traditional published text is that authors have to remain accountable to someone - their editors, their peers, and their readers. We know who they are and they can be questioned about their methods and data.

Research Ideas

My two leading research project ideas are:

1. Online queer fan communities. When I used to have time to watch some TV shows regularly, I was pretty caught off-guard when I went online about how many online fan communities were based around a queer interpretation of the show. One of the major manifestations of this is "slash" fan fiction, in which the author writes a fictional romantic story about two male characters or two female characters from a TV show or movie. A lot of these communities also form around forums where they discuss everything from the last episode of the show in question to politics to their own lives. The best example that I have found so far would be "The Kitten, the Witches, and the Bad Wardrobe", a forum dedicated to the lesbian couple of Willow and Tara on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Another example that kept coming up was fan fiction for the show Xena: Warrior Princess, which portrays the two main characters as romantically involved. One of the most popular sites in this category it seems would be the stories of Missy Good, who apparently became so popular among Xena fans that the producers of the show asked her to help write a couple of episodes.

2. Online advertising. It seems that a lot of companies are getting into the online advertising game, and in a more innovative way than in the past. Previously online advertising mostly consisted of targeted banner or text ads - now some companies are creating interactive online ads, videos, and other non-traditional ad projects. I think this really reflects the continuing growth and mainstream acceptance of the internet and world wide web, as now companies feel that they can reach more and more people online. One example would be Burger King's "Subservient Chicken" website, where the user can type in commands and watch a video of a man in a chicken costume carrying them out.

Right now I would say I am more drawn to the first topic, partially because even in the preliminary looking around that I have been doing, people in these communities have already been really helpful in pointing me in the right direction. That definitely makes my job a lot easier, especially in finding . Also, I think the topic is really interesting because some people literally spend every day interacting with these online communities, and they seem to be getting some sort of support and connection out of it that maybe they don't think they can get otherwise in their everyday life. I'm still not counting out the second topic, though.