Anyone notice the "Assignment" category on my recent posts? I think I have to break away from the mindset that my MT blog (this one right here) is purely for academic blogging. However, just to play the devil's advocate, it's kinda nice to have clean n' clear (ugh - I can't believe I just said this) distinction between my personal and "professional" blogging. My mind's flipped around with so many somersaults that now I can't make it stop. Look at me...I'm rambling.
This post is a compilation of the second portfolio for WFTI (EL236). Without further ado, I present to you (maybe I should break out in a tap dance/song number):
Panel Discussions
Reading Reflections/In Class Responses
Wild Card Entry
Xenoblogging
Evan's post on rethinking marriage and homosexual relationships has sparked quite a discussion. I'm glad to say, however, that the people who have commented have managed to approach a sensitive topic like mature adults and deliver their message across in a similar manner. Good to know we have level headed individuals running around campus these days.
As I mentioned in the comment on Evan's blog, my approach is more humanist, because people don't pop out of cookie cutter molds. Absolutely every person out there is unique, therefore every person requires tailored attention. Granted we don't usually have time to just sit down and listen to people talk, but maybe we need to rethink and reevaluate the way we live. People are not standardised.
Having said that, the dilemma that arises is whether people should be thrown into a "melting pot," or whether they should be allowed to celebrate their differences and come together as one community. I'm not going to argue civil liberties, quote statistics, or raise controversial issues. All I'm going to do is ask the people who read this post to stop for a minute and think if the person standing in front of them doesn't deserve to be treated with respect. We don't necessarily have to like what every other person does - just evaluate the pros and cons with an open, adult mind.
Why do women need special rights? Why did they have to fight for voting privileges? Why do gay men and women have to face opposition from the "straight" folk? Honestly, does religion have all the answers? Maybe - just maybe - these issues wouldn't be as huge as they are now if at least one generation had decided to stop making a big deal out of them and treated people like intelligent, hard working human beings. Some time back, a friend and I talked about the feminist movement. She thought that it had degenerated into a hypocritical movement that required nothing but special treatment of women. Special rights go beyond equality. They don't demand "equal pay for equal work," rather, they seem to say that "we wan't to be treated better than you." Perhaps there would be no need for quotas and priviliged seats in legislatures if we could recognize that people are fundamentally the same. We all love, hate, feel, eat, walk, talk, and work with the same resources with little differences.
Some would feel that at this point, this argument is purely rhetorical. But is it really? Growing up in the Middle East, I had friends from all around the world. Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Lebanese, Arabs, Egyptians, Israelis, Afghans - you name it. At the end of the day, it didn't matter where we came from. All that mattered was that we were able to share everything from food to life stories and everything in between, with the bonds of friendship tying us together as opposed to going up in arms over our religions and nationalities. As an Indian in America, I've faced a lot of discrimination over the four years that I've been here. I'm not bitter because I chose to make friends with people who think with open minds and are accepting of the fact that all said and done, it's just one world. How would you like to be treated in a new land with new people? How do you treat new people in your own land?
Interesting article on Wired News. Apparently, Wikipedia is expanding its realm from serving as an information source to "creating" news. According to the article, "members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded."
I like Chris's analogy of the situation. He's right - it's not very different from working on a school newspaper where an army of editors tries to look over possibly every article before sending it to a final print. The downside to Wikinews might be the validity of the information. Even though the website has a disclaimer saying that it's still under construction, the open approach of Wikinews might result in distorted information. However, Wikipedia has been anything but a failure since it's inception, so the prospects of Wikinews as a reliable source don't seem too dim. It's too early to refute it as a silly idea, or cheer it on as the greatest news source around. Only time will tell.
I have this extremely annoying habit of making people read. No, really. I do. Everytime I think I've found something worthwhile, I try and match it up with a person who would appreciate it, pass it on, and then I try and follow up on whether they read it or not. I have an enormous circulating library of books. Some I haven't seen for years. Imagine my joy when I started blogging - now everyone could read what I'd "discovered." Take a dip into my blog someday, and you'll know what I'm talking about.
According to Himmer, "the weblog collapses many of the common assumptions made about texts, as it complicates the distinction between author and audience through the multivocality of both direct commenting, and the reader's ability to reorder the narrative in myriad ways." Crooked Timber, an academic group blog, is an excellent example that pertains to the quote above. The highly popular multi-user weblog creates an audience even amongst its own authors, breaking away from the traditional concepts in print media. The defining word with any weblog would be "interactive." It's not just another journal out there - it's a new means to get information across. Webloggers are changing the way we view information (you know they work when the BBC picks up on them) by making it more "real" or "connected." In the words of a highly respected teacher, "we gotta change the world."
The novelty, perhaps lies in the non-linear approach that a weblog can develop. It doesn't have to be read from the beginning to the end, because there is no end to a weblog, unless ofcourse it's terminated. However, the natural assumption is that the author will regularly update his blog. As Himmer says, "even the rambling non-linearity of Ulysses is, in fact, linear. There is only one direction in which to read the novel, from front to back, and the text is complete when the reader passes from one cover to the other." The feedback from posts goes straight to the author as opposed to endorsements by other authors and book group discussions. With traditional media, the author pretty much throws the book out into the wild once it is out in print.
"On the Web, the notion of a diary has been turned inside out: weblogs are public diaries. It is likely that the neat line we draw between our public and private selves in the real world will continue to erode, grain by grain."
The article, Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom opens with the quote above. I think that I'll politely disagree. For one, the Internet revolution has been going on for years, with weblogs joining the race very recently. In the last few years, more and more people have been "logging on," and this has changed the way we receive and disperse information. Since more people have had greater access to all sorts of records online, holding weblogs responsible for increased exposure to our private lives is hardly justified. At least not all the way. As Lowe and Williams say, "to use blogs merely as a tool for private journaling is to privilege our understanding of journals as private writing spaces without considering the benefits of weblogs as public writing."
Consider the quintessential coffee house setting. People sitting around a table, sipping their lattes, exchanging ideas, and walking away in wake of possibly a highly stimulating conversation. Now consider the same conversation transposed on a different medium. Every person that choses to join has his/her own "space" with an equal, but unique take at the conversation, and ideas are expressed in their own sort of real time. The same analogy would apply to the different genres of writing. There are as many weblogs out there as there are genres, with journaling being one of them. Granted that some blogs out there filled with teenage angst are sometimes try one's patience, but what is really so different about the blogs from the natural process of growing up through maintaining volumes of private journals. Besides, this just goes to prove another rule of thumb of the writing world: why write if you don't to be read? Who doesn't start jumping with joy at the sight of a new comment? I think I read my own blog more than I read all the others collectively.
Speaking of reading, one of the most immediate effects of blogging would be on the students reading habits. How many people know college students who read the newspaper? It's a marketing fact - the corporate world hardly focuses on college students through newspaper advertising. This is just a personal observation, but I've been more in touch with the world since I started blogging, mainly because I'm motivated to contribute to the current affairs conversations with the fellow bloggers out there.
In an academic setting, students can trace the development of their writing through their blogs. Also, since their writing has wider exposure, the motivation to present slightly better than their best work comes by naturally. As the article quotes, "weblogs can [...] provide students 'with the social interaction and motivation to extend their writing.'" Apparently, students "take real-world writing more seriously when it is done on the web, where it might be seen and used." Ofcourse, this might just mean that our generation is more comfortable working with emerging technology, but I think that the real time interaction reflects the need for a community involvement in academia.
Thoughts on the reading, anyone?
Perseus, a market research organisation reports:
Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.
Very interesting...this statement essentially translates to say that "young adult" blogs are the representing sample of the entire population (population being a statistical term here; not the world). Not to say that I haven't seen angst ridden posts online, but I tend to think that the statistics published in this article represent just that section of the blogging community. To present a different side of the argument, "A-List" bloggers (2Blowhards, Crooked Timber, Matt Yglesias, etc) tend to link to other bloggers who focus on the quality of their content, and so on and so forth. Does anyone see the snowball effect here? Obviously, results are based on the sample that's tested; but to assume that the sample is a likely representation of the population, with a definite answer in mind prior to testing, is to present a biased statistic.
While I agree that blogging is increasingly becoming a social phenomenon, I think to say that "blogging is [...] persistent messaging for young adults," is to manipulate my opinion. It seems to me that the report (and the testing) focuses on a miniscule sample of the blogging community.
I just realised that I never linked to the article I was talking about. It's here in case anyone wanted to read it.
I would recommend taking a look at it simply because it helps clarify personal opinions related to blogging. Also, I have to admit, I wouldn't be thinking about blogging at this level if I wasn't dealing with it at an academic level. The discussion in class today brought to light some interesting theories about blogging and it's relation to contemporary culture. It's interesting to note that most people in class saw it as a new* form of social interaction. *(Read: new media).
There are certain points that the article discusses that I disagree with. For one, I think that the authors did'nt use enough samples to form an argument. Just the fact that all examples had negative connotations to them made me think that my opinion was being led, i.e., being formed for me. Secondly, the foundations that the authors built to argue their case seemed unnecessary to me. I would rather have seen an argument first, followed by the discussion to support it later.
What I did like was (and I mentioned this in my previous post) that they see blogging as an evolving genre, i.e. a reflection of contemporary culture by observing developments in real time.