Category Archives: blogging

classroom blogs/wikis?

Are you a teacher or professor? Does your class have a blog or a wiki that is used for classroom purposes? If so, can you list it in the comments or send me an email with the URL to dmb .AT. sims .DOT. berkeley .DOT. edu

phd weblogs

I just revisited phd weblogs which is a collection of PhD students blogging. There are only 170 of us on there and i know that there are a whole lot more. So, if you’re an academic blogger and you’re reading this, add yourself there. And tell your friends. It’s really fun to surf and find out what other folks are researching.

Oh, and it’s a great way of procrastinating when you’ve read PhD comics so many time that you have half of them memorized.

another nytimes article

Wow… When i wrote that journalists must be absolutely intrigued by the bloggers, i didn’t expect 3 big NYTimes articles in one week. Today’s NYTimes article finally uses the term blog in the headline (thank you NYTimes editors): Blogged in Boston: Politics Gets an Unruly Spin. The article covers the role of the bloggers at the convention and aptly accounts for how they are different than journalists, while simultaneously noting the sniffing behavior between the two groups as they tried to figure each other out.

more diarists and Web logs

Not all journalists learn from bloggers. My cranky rant and op-ed went unnoticed by the NYTimes, who proceeded to run an article entitled Wry Hoaxes Enliven the World of Web Diarists that talks about “Web logs.”

I should note that i’m by no means upset with the authors of either NYTimes articles, as i’m fully aware that they are at the whim of their editorial stuff. Unlike Xeni, i don’t have a c’est la vie attitude about it. [Update: Xeni does not have this attitude and often stops working with editors who pull this shit. Apologies.]

One way of asserting power and marginalizing people is to own the language by reframing the terms of the oppressed into the terms of the privileged, thereby degrading the original terminology (think ‘liberal’). This is why one of the most powerful tactics of oppressed people is to reclaim their terminology, to own it as empowering (think ‘queer’). The US civil rights battles were ripe with oppressive uses and reclaiming of black terminology (think ‘nigger’).

One of the rules of anthropology is to always use the terms of the people. By reframing a people’s language into hegemonic terminology, the writer oppresses the people, owns the people. It is not only a lack of respect, but an attempt to assert authority and power.

This doesn’t just apply to anthropology. I continue to be cranky with the NYTimes.

The New Blogocracy (Salon op-ed by moi)

The New Blogocracy is a Salon op-ed that i wrote based on the blog entry Demeaning Bloggers. I tried to go deeper into my feelings about pitting journalists against bloggers. I think that it’s a fun piece.

If you don’t have a Salon account, click the Free Day Pass. NARAL is definitely an organization worth supporting.

Oh, and i’ve also decided that i *lurve* having an editor, particularly one as constructive as Andrew Leonard.

Demeaning bloggers: the NYTimes is running scared

Blogging has terrified mainstream media for a while now. Journalists want to know if blogs are going to degrade their profession, open up new possibilities or otherwise challenge their authority. This also means that whenever the press writes about blogs, one must critically consider what biases are embedded in their reporting. This morning, the NYTimes took their bias to the headlines:

Web Diarists Are Now Official Members of Convention Press Corps

As i’ve written before, blogging is rhetorically situated between journalism and diarying. Most often, people label blogging as one or the other in order to degrade it. The NYTimes pulled this act today because they have a professional interest in portraying convention bloggers as “low-brow” and unworthy of reading, while the NYTimes will present the real “high-brow” convention story. By framing bloggers as diarists, the NYTimes is demanding that the reader see blogs as petty, childish and self-absorbed. They further perpetuate this view by pasting a picture of a youth on the front of the article to suggest that bloggers are all inexperienced and naive, further implying that their reports will not have the value of the more “adult” perspective of “real” journalists.

The entire spin of the article focuses on how bloggers are like children in a candy store – naive, inexperienced and overwhelmed by what is now available to them. The article focuses on the minutia of blogging, emphasizing that bloggers won’t really cover the real issues, but provide the “low-brow” gossip. (I somehow suspect that the NYTimes is far more likely to cover what various attendees are wearing than the bloggers.) The article does proceed to share its stance on bloggers through the voice of one subject: “I think that bloggers have put the issue of professionalism under attack.” (Not Jason Blair?)

I am horrified by this article. Not only does the NYTimes reveal their naivete about blogging, but they use their lack of clarity to demean a practice that they perceive as threatening. No wonder their professionalism is under attack.

[Also posted at M2M.]

blogging is trapped in a metaphor

I’ve been trying to sit with some of my frustrations about sociable technologies lately. I’ve been trying to work through them in order to understand why Liz’s frustration with blogging research resonates and why i start twitching every time people put together panels that pit blogs against “big” journalism. I wanted to let go of my boiling anger over the fact that YASNS do not look like “real” social networks.

I realized that all of these concerns come from a common root. Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based. The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices.

Metaphors are not new in the technological world. Email’s metaphor was built into its naming. Yet, today, when we talk about email, we can draw on the metaphor of mail, but we all know that email is something entirely different. It is a fundamentally new communication system, not simply an electronic form of its predecessor.

My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a distanced vantage point.

What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it’s not like a newspaper, it’s like a diary! or vice versa. They’re both right and wrong. If you’re stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system.

Now that most people are on email, it is rare to have to explain that form. But when people were starting up, it was confusing. My grandparents thought that i couldn’t write because my emails were strewn with spelling errors, lacked capitalization and were often fragments. Nowadays, they get it because they get that email is different than letters.

With blogging and YASNS, people haven’t “gotten it” yet. Even many of the people creating these technologies still think that they’re building out the metaphors. Of course, if they stay trapped in the metaphor, they’re doomed to failure. It is crucial to understand that YASNS and blogs are different than their metaphoric precursors.

This is precisely why it’s bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it’s also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.