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So, I started this blog about a week and a half ago, and I’m already noticing something interesting happening – at random moments in my day, I catch myself composing a post about whatever’s on my mind at the moment. In the past few days, I’ve essentially written posts in my head on the possible role that a blog could play in my upcoming job search (coming this fall to a webpage near you), the play Urinetown and the nature of self-referential/self-conscious theater, and Howard Dean and the “internet candidate” meme, to name a few.

This is interesting for a few reasons, all of which connect to the nature of reading and writing…

1) The blog as a form is continually evolving, but I seem to have internalized a certain idea of what a blog post is and what distinguished it from, say, an academic paper or an Instant Message. I’d have to think more about what the norms might be (in fact, I’ll be thinking quite a bit about this, because I’d like to incorporate blogs, both as a practice and an object of study, into a course I’m designing for next spring titled Writing as a Technology), but I definitely feel like I’m playing with and testing the limits of a new genre.

2) As to where my understanding of this new genre comes from, I’d have to say that it’s mostly from reading other blogs. This is something I find really fascinating – you’ve got this new technology (a weblog), and people don’t initially know how to use it, so they import their understandings of precious technologies and use that knowledge to inform their use of the new one. Eventually some common understanding emerges, shaped by technological constraints and social consensus, and a community forms of people who’re all using the technology in roughly the same way.

3) The intriguing part to me is how newcomers (those who didn’t help define the norms in the first place) are socialized into this preexisting community. In my case, as I mentioned below, this happens via lurking – however, I’m bringing my own experiences from other literary forms into this one, so there’s a process by which I have to integrate my previous knowledge into this new form…maybe this is what I’m doing as I’m walking around writing in my head.

4) Blog-writing isn’t the only thing going on in my head these days – there’s dissertation writing as well. In fact, the two seem to be starting to bump up against one another, which is fascinating because on their surface they’d seem about as far apart as one could imagine. A blog post seems to generally be a shorter piece, taking one idea and developing it, then moving on to the next, not necessarily related, post. Sometimes, a blogger might pursue an idea over multiple posts, but the effect is that of a constellation of individual entries.

Meanwhile, a dissertation, as best as I understand it, is a monolithic form – yes, it’s ideally made up of smaller chapters that can each stand on their own, be published as articles, etc., but a dissertation ultimately seems to be conceptualized in its totality, as a single coherent edifice. Which helps to explain why we grad students tend to feel so much angst about the dissertation as a project, about how to even gain a foothold on its sheer surface, until we’re in the thick of it and we can grapple with its constituent parts. At least, that’s been my experience.

The upshot of all this is that I’m finding myself constantly writing to myself, in my head, and though the blog-writing-in-my-head and the dissertation-writing-in-my-head have mostly been going on separately, I’ve started to notice in the past few days that my blog-voice is starting to show up in my disertation-thinking, and vice versa. Now sure how this’ll play out, but it lends another dimension to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang’s comment on my first post.

5) The last thing that’s worth noting is that all of this “mind-blogging” has been happening when I’m not at a computer, and hence unable to actually turn those thoughts into words on a screen. I’ve come to terms with the fact that my “mind-dissertating” is productive, because as a writer I tend to do a lot of constructive work away from my keyboard, and this work tends to wind up back in my writing once I sit down and start typing. However, how do I come to terms with the fact that most of this “mind-blogging” will never make it to screen, both for reasons of distraction and of lack of time? Any thoughts from more seasoned bloggers out there?

Of course, one solution is just to spend more time at my desk, and less time wandering around thinking about stuff…

Comments 2 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.

askpang,

July 7, 2003 at 7:50 pm

Re: your remark that

you’ve got this new technology (a weblog), and people don’t initially know how to use it, so they import their understandings of precious technologies and use that knowledge to inform their use of the new one.

This is, of course, the phenomenon that Bolter and Grusin develop in their book Remediation– though they’re mainly interested in how it serves to create the illusion of escaping artistic conventions or technological limitations.

Epistemographer,

July 8, 2003 at 1:08 am

It’s also similar to the idea of technological frame, if you want to argue that new technologies are initially understood through preexisting frames. There’s also McLuhan and his rearview mirror metaphor, though that (and Bolter and Grusin, for that matter) tends to be more technologically determinist than I’d like.

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