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Hannah Mueller's picture

I wouldn't call it a dictatorship

I understand why you would call KT's blog a dictatorship--because it's not as much of an interactive conversation as some other blogs. But I wouldn't be so quick to create a metaphorical relationship between the political sphere we're talking about and blogs. I think we can call both a dictatorship and her blog examples of genres that evolve similarly, as we've explained; but for me at least, the two are just so different--in substance and intent-- that the comparison you made seemed extreme.

You also say that you don't consider what she's doing blogging since she doesn't engage with her commenters much. I would say it's still a blog, but a different genre of blog than the ones Tim Burke is working on. If you would call it a column instead of a blog, how can you use that label to differentiate between a column on blogger and a column in a newspaper? The medium is different and there is still some interactivity on Syllabub that doesn't happen in print.

I hadn't heard Simon de Beavouir's theory about change as transcendance, but that's interesting. Reading Borges, I'm never sure how he feels about changing into other people, but I like this idea that we "should strive to always change into 'others'". It's a good thing, usually, to break out of the performance roles we're placed into. I wonder though, how much the issue of gender mattered to Borges, because he hardly ever writes about gender or women at all--but maybe that doesn't mean it didn't have an important impact on him, as you suggest.

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