Literary Kinds

When I talk about formatting on a blog, I'm talking about more than just where your paragraph breaks should be and how many spaces should be between those paragraphs.  I'm also talking about making sure that when you copy/paste your entry from Word into the blog site that all of your apostrophes and quotation marks are still part of the entry.  I couldn't get through Carolyn R.

As is routine, we began the class by connecting ourselves to one another. Although this time a person would introduce another person and the latter would be the one to explain the connection. It was really interesting to see how at first what people had in common were very general things such as gender but as time went on it became dorms and even languages that linked people. I have to admit that at the start of this course I was not too fond of this exercise due to my horrible memory with names but as the days pass I am not only learning each person's name, but an interesting bit of information as well.

 After the class discussion on Thursday, I found myself thinking about the extent to which I blog and read blogs. In class I shared that I read a couple of my friends blogs and that I don't blog. I found, after some thought, that this is not true. This is my 4th class in which I've been using Serendip, hence I've actually blogged a fair amount through this site. As mentioned in class we all use blogs more so than we think, whether it be blogs about computers or any other research that is being done for classes. There are also a large number of students on this campus (or used to be) that visited sites like CollegeACB. I admit that I have been on this college gossip site and have read the material, though I have never submitted an entry on this site.

I was looking through some webcomics and blogs today after our discussion in class, and I came across this particularly applicable comic by xkcd.com. I believe it was Ed Folsom who mentioned fractals in relation to genre, quoting Dimock on the "fractal database." Here is "Blogofractal" as pictured by xkcd.

http://xkcd.com/124

 Jo(e)'s blog and the comments it inspired got me to think a bit more about blogging than I have in the past.  I've never really blogged myself (aside from now, I guess), but I do consider it an interesting hobby, one that no one can ignore these days. Most of the people who responded to Jo(e)'s posting, however, have taken a more active part in the blogging world, and their views provided points of interest for me.

 The idea that you can "think rhizomically" insinuates that you should consider things in terms of having no center or structure. But Professor Dalke mentioned an interesting point last class: Can you organize the world without a center? Isn't an individual constantly thinking in terms of themselves? Jo(e) references the blogging medium, talking about "Bitch Ph.D."s blog as "her ideas, her opinions, her style of writing". Wouldn't that mean that a blog is an expression of an individual, putting whomever is posting, whether it be the blogger themselves or someone leaving a remark about the material, in the spotlight? Just by skimming through the comments on Jo(e)'s blog, one finds a sea of "I"s...

As jo(e) notes in "Blogging as an Emerging Genre," a blog offers the potential for "a text with multiple voices," less constrained by a single format of writing and open to everyone. In the responses to jo(e)'s post, numerous words (many contradictory) in relation to the concept of blogging caught my attention: "broader," vs. "trivial," "superficial by its instant, easy access." Individuals' purposes in blogging also differed: "the blog is this kind of spastic release of energy for me" vs.

     Jo(e)'s post was interesting, but the comments after it were even more so.  The post by Dr.K concerning how "information gets trivialized and made superficial by its instant, easy access" when it is put on the internet brought up memories from Folsom's article. Databases and blogs are unifiers in the sense that they open new doors to those who had limited access to their information before, but is this necessarily a good thing?