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04/26/2004 Archived Entry: "More Blog. Less Talk"
For some reason, I’m always bothered by much of the meta talk regarding weblogs that circulates on weblogs. I’m reminded of an AOR radio station’s mantra: LESS TALK MORE ROCK. Let’s have less talk about weblogs, and more blogging. Brush off the cob webs, get to thinking, theorizing, commenting, ridiculing, etc. In short, more writing. Maybe because I don't engage in meta talk, lots of "academic" blogs don't link to me (hey, I have a PhD! I'm academic! I'm a WPA!)
Because what’s missing from much of the meta talk is the fact that people are writing and connecting their writing in all kinds of ways (he says, as he makes a meta gesture himself). Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don’t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone’s there yet, but many are; many we don’t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some textbook or uninformed instructor asking them to write about “a controversial issue” or their favorite shirt. Take it to the Web. There you’ll find the bizarre ideas and beliefs many of us hold linked together in Shaviro’s imagined connected world (Sci-fi? Life-fi as well). There you will create something to write about.
Why write? What pushes thousands to the Web (via the homepage or the blog)? What must comp do to get on board? Not what it’s currently doing, that’s for sure.
Exhibit A: Typical weblog assignment in first year writing course:
Find several blogs of interest to you. Do a rhetorical analysis of the blogs for your essay.
Wha? Wha? To paraphrase Woody Allen in Manhattan, rhetorical analysis is one thing; actually writing to the Web is another.
The assignment might be rethought in any number of ways. For ejemplo:
Start a blog which explores throughout the semester your favorite fetishes. Interconnect your writing with other blogs, similar or distinct, to what you are writing about. Find connections in places you’d least expect them. Make connections to force rhetorical situations and power.
Why not? That, folks, is writing.
Replies: 2 comments
Hey Derek
My critique is that there is analysis and there's production.
I want students to engage with production.
So it's the same with web writing. I'd rather that students learn how to participate in the web community as producers and not just be consumers (which is part of reading and analyzing is about, apologies to Barthes).
So, when I have taught weblogs (or any other flavor of media), the idea is we engage with the new rhetorical possibilities this media form offers us (as opposed to what we are used to in print).
Posted by j @ 04/26/2004 02:35 PM EST
Apologies up front: this is a meta-comment. My first semester teaching with a weblog is coming to an end; I resorted to a rhet-analysis of blogs early on because so few students had heard of them. I suppose students' familiarities with blogging will grow the range of riveting projects we can start cooking much earlier in an sixteen-week semester. With freshman this semester, we were slowed by quite a lot of on-ramping and resistance. But you're right about shaking out new, lively assignments. Probably if you start to go the way of meta-talking as a way of getting on the a-list blogrolls, the audience you gain will sit in the warm seats of the bodies up and wandering for less meta.
Posted by Derek @ 04/26/2004 02:00 PM EST