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.

Dictionary.com says the definition of a database is "a comprehensive collection of related data organized for convenient access, generally in a computer."

The same site recognizes an archive as "any extensive record or collection of data."

     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?

Laurie McNeill's article "The Diary on the Internet" was published in 2003, meaning all the examples cited were from 2002 and sooner.  Many of them were even from the nineties!  I did not become acquainted with internet culture until I was nine, in 2001 (when I actually had a website on Digimon), and of course, I was nine and did not frequent any serious parts of the internet.

As we are reading these articles and blog posts about the genre of blogs, I began to think about why I read the blogs I read, and why I don't write one myself. (The second was fairly obvious, and flows from the first: I have a dairy, but a truly private, paper and pen documentation of lists and life, because nothing I say has a purpose besides fulling a need I have to catalog my life.) But I also realized as McNeill mentioned that "I am drawn to Web diaries that most closely resemble traditional literary tests" (25) that all of the blogs I read are by authors (and while I do not read many blogs, this is still, I believe, significant). They are usually by authors who have written books I like, and who do not often post meaningless rambles.

We began today's class by building a "web" among us, using points of likeness. This seemed hard to do, and we ended up using very general categories ("woman," "student"). We next turned to discussion about the klutziness/user-unfriendliness of our course page...there are too many places to "click," and so we get discouraged from being responsive to one another's comments....how to work w/ this limitation?

 Perhaps our past discussion influenced how I read Folsom's essay, but what captured me in his words was not an argument about databases and archives, or even about his own Walt Whitman Archive; it was his conflict between the organization of literature and the constraints of genres. Folsom remarks that "peculiarity to person, period, or place always leads to division and discrimination, always moves away from and against universality" (1572). Everything that I read in Folsom's writing seemed to me to center around the limitations of genre. Whitman himself pushed against the restraints of being bound into one idea, one limited section of the written word.

Below is the attachment of the powerpoint that MissArcher2 and I presented to the class for our final performance.

We also put a song together to the tune of "The Fresh Prince of Bel Air" which talked about the lives of each of the James siblings. In addition to this we discussed the possible effects that Henry James, Sr. had on each of his children and how this may have effected their work and their lives. 

Post 1- 2/1/10: The Diary of Alice James
"These long pauses don't point to any mental aridity, my 'roomy forehead' is as full as ever of germinating thughts, but alas the machinery is more and more out of kilter.  I am sorry for you all, for I feel as if I hadn't even yet given my message.  I would there were more bursts of enthusiasm, less of the carping tone, through this, but I fear it comes by nature, and after all, the excellent Islander will ne'er be crushed by the knowledge of the eye that was upon him, through the long length of years, and the monotone of the enthusiast is more wearisome to sustain than a dyspeptic one." -Diary of Alice James, September 3, 1881