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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
From metablogging to rhetorical theory
While I was at MLA this December, I attended a panel discussion of the future of the Society for Critical Exchange in honor of its 30th anniversary. Several of the founding members narrated the beginnings of the Society in a moment when theory was embattled, except where it wasn’t so much, within the Holy of Holies of the Ivy League. The point of forming the SCE, they said, was to break down those professional barriers to access, to offer participation in a discussion of critical theory to academics whose feet rarely touch hallowed ground. For those of us in state and smaller private colleges and universities, new research topics and methods must be proven for administrations that seek “results” both in research and pedagogy, which is bound to leave theory hung one way or another.*
As the discussion moved from founding member to founding member, “the internet” was invoked again and again. The SCE had once had a chat room. Could that be started up again? Or maybe not a chat room. Maybe a sort of Wikipedia thing, with multiple contributors and editors, but not an encyclopedia? More, like, for discussion? Yes, see, someone could write up an essay on a topic, and then people could respond with their own suggestions or thoughts! All barriers to access will be demolished and theory will belong to the people! You won’t even need an academic affiliation to participate! This will be the future!
Of course, the Valve and many other wonderful critical discussion blogs (including my own at The Long 18th) have created exactly what the SCE-ers were fantasizing about. They’re collaboratively authored, but in a way that allows each author a distinct voice. With relatively little moderation, the conversation on a topic can expand regardless of the spatial boundaries created by print and of the professional boundaries propagated in print. The time required for a conversation is collapsed to a day or a week, rather than the six months or two years required for journals or collections. But you know all this. John told you all this last month. These are all the things blogs do to fulfill all our utopian fantasies about them; otherwise we wouldn’t bother.
What I didn’t realize until the SCE panel is that, while we’re very good at telling other bloggers how blogs are making our academic lives worth living, our PR department should be fired. How is it that the speakers at the SCE panel had no clue that what they’d just invented up there at that table was not the future, some vague dreamy techno-something that might just one day make the walls of that old tower tremble, but a pretty regular part of many serious academics’ lives? I guarantee that every one of them has heard of blogging and knows, to some extent, what its format is, but not once in an hour and a half did I hear the word “blog” come out of anyone’s mouth except mine. And I certainly did not see a single individual from that crowded panel at the ones on wikis or blogging.
The incident reminded me of when some friends and I started reading hypertext theory as a side project during my M.A. program. We’d assign ourselves readings that were considered of some importance, and, a week later, get together to throw them at the walls and read selections in funny voices. We wanted to like it, honest! But after the fifth or so article that began with something like, “I have never actually used this internet thing, but a graduate student described it to me, and this is what I imagine it will do In The Future,” we were fed up. (From what I understand, hypertext theory has made leaps in the intervening years.) I am all for utopian, teary-eyed visions of the future, but I find them rather grating when those eyes could easily be trained on the present, where empirical experience awaits with tangible arms outspread.
It seems that fantasies about total access are easier for some than participation in a total-access community. The possible reasons are multiple, so I’ll just spell out those that have occurred to me here:
1) Where I teach at Queens College, the office of technology has sent out letters to faculty who refuse to use the webgrading system, diagnosing them with CRAP: Computer-Related Anxiety and Phobia. This would be just a silly acronym if it weren’t for the appropriate level of dismissiveness in it. Yes, there are generations of people afraid of and intimidated by computers, and especially the internet, but operating systems have become ridiculously user-friendly. One need know almost nothing about “technology” to access, read, and even publish on blogs. What seems to be happening is a refusal to become the “sort of person” who uses computers, and especially the internet, for anything other than IMDB and A Libris.
2) An outgrowth of (1), this is a condition that prevents Serious Academics from participating in a genre of writing well-known (e.g., in New Yorker cartoons) for political extremism, whining, romantic details, sadsackism, and the exposure of weak points, with the last being the most upsetting. Reading academic blogs often means seeing very good thinkers and writers admitting failure and asking for help. To lurk is to be confronted with that weakness, and to comment is to condone that weakness. Therefore, it’s best to pretend ignorance of the whole thing, except as a laughable cultural phenomenon. “Ha, ha! Pointless incessant barking indeed! Ha!”
3) While we all talk a good game about wanting to lower the barriers to access to critical conversation, I’m willing to bet most of us have had unhappy moments when we’ve wished that barrier were reinstituted somewhere at the level of our own heels. Utopian visions of lowering barriers rarely take into account what that lowering means for the conversation. Barriers end up being raised back up through impenetrable prose styles, the manipulation of vocabularies into jargon, and the inaccessibility of subject matter for discussion. Every blog has its own battle with finding the “right” audience, and doing so can mean becoming inhospitable to certain people. I admit I tend to be unwelcoming to commenters that aren’t sensitive to rhetorical nuance, and I’m sure you have your own peeves. All of these peeves reflect our own prejudices, none of them terribly generous (some of them actively classist, sexist, and racist), and none of them utopian in sentiment. Between fantasizing a total-access utopia and coming face-to-face with one’s own narrow-mindedness, most people would choose the former.
4) This is where I scrape off all the cynicism and admit that some of the desire to ignore the present state of academic discussion online may just be utopianism in its best sense. Despite the huge participation in academic discussions on blogs and the intense abstractions of those discussions and theories about those discussions, academics who choose not to be involved (but still dream of the possibility of such a thing) are effectively saying that whatever all this talk is about, it’s not what they were dreaming of.
The recent trend of academic metablogging has been good for helping us to get on the same page about what we’re doing. Scott‘s and Joseph‘s metablogging series have been dead-on, I think, especially where the limitations of academic blogging are clearly spelled out. It’s important to know not only what the medium is good for, but also where it fails. Bérubé’s paper at the above-mentioned panel was striking to me in that it exclusively discussed the kind of high-speed, soul-killing spat behavior that kills good blogs dead every day, and that it must have been baffling to anyone in attendance who hadn’t seen a spat online (or would have had any non-bloggers been in the room). The limitations of the medium are serious and many.
But with all this metablogular talk, I haven’t seen much in the way of a real, useful rhetorical analysis of academic blogging that could be accessed and understood by those who have experience with blogs and by those who need to be convinced that “the internet” is the present of academic discourse, not just the future. Many of the anxieties that beginning bloggers (and non-bloggers) have about subject matter (How much should I write about my personal life?), audience (How do I attract readers who will argue with me just enough?), and purpose (What the hell am I blogging to achieve?) are, when they apply to other media, addressed by rhetorical theory. The process required to answer these questions has been developed by individual bloggers, seemingly in isolation.
Luckily, on the internet, we are not in isolation. We see the blogs we like and we imitate them. I knew when I started the Long 18th that I wanted to replicate some of the structure of the Valve within the confines of a particular period of scholarship, and that imitation has made for a relatively smooth first five months. The collaborative reading process seemed to be productive here, so we shamelessly stole it and did it there. The tone and range of the posts here seemed to yield a particularly desirable kind of audience, so we yanked that too. What I’d like to spend some time thinking about is what exactly it was that we deemed yank-worthy and how and why it does what it does.
Eventually, I’d like to find myself at a panel like the one I described above, listening to people fantasize about the possibility of a thing on the internet that would do these certain, amazing things, and I would not only be able to tell them that such a thing exists, as I did, but how to successfully construct such a thing for themselves.
* - Ironically, the SCE is leaving its current home at Case Western Reserve, my alma mater, because the administration can no longer afford to fund projects that don’t fund themselves. Go figure.
Comments
An outgrowth of (1), this is a condition that prevents Serious Academics from participating in a genre of writing well-known (e.g., in New Yorker cartoons) for political extremism, whining, romantic details, sadsackism, and the exposure of weak points, with the last being the most upsetting. Reading academic blogs often means seeing very good thinkers and writers admitting failure and asking for help. To lurk is to be confronted with that weakness, and to comment is to condone that weakness.
What I love about this paragraph is that I can easily think back on my own posts at the Kugelmass Episodes, and check every one of these off the list (though obviously satires of blogging are going to exaggerate such faults). Even blogging under my own name, with careful checks on what I write—it is impossible to be dishonest over a long period of time, with that much text involved.
You’ve named the bogeymen, and they’re less scary in the light. Rather than thinking of blogging as a medium that can overcome these faults, I wonder if we can think of bloggers as the moving target, since they can see as well as anyone how their posts read (especially with the help of commenters) and reap the benefits of a life examined thusly.
It would require a much different theory of readership, of course—one based on watching a thinker evolve, rather than one based on a monolithic series of texts. But that might be a suitably utopian thing to work towards, as well.
*
Yank-worthy at the Valve? Well, many of the posts have a tone of gentle, self-deprecating reflection, which I think invites readers and commenters. The writers try to keep their sense of humor close at hand. There is enough focus that you can usually expect the entries to have something to do with books or criticism, but there aren’t any specific restrictions constraining content. The writers are clearly distinguishable from each other according to interests stated and developed across many entries.
Great post, Carrie.
It would require a much different theory of readership, of course—one based on watching a thinker evolve, rather than one based on a monolithic series of texts.
That seems key to me, Joseph, and it seems most obvious to me when we post about teaching. I can’t think of a post on teaching in which someone confidently says “This is how I’ve always done X and it always works. You should try it.” Rather, we tend to blog about teaching because (a) we’ve just tried something that worked for the first time, or (b) we have a problem we don’t know how to solve and we want help.
To someone unused to this aspect of blogging (say, someone Googling the name of a job candidate), those posts can sound weak, defeatist, or overly humble compared to the kind of writing we would do for print. Pedagogy blogging is inherently similar to conversations over the copy machine; I may have a problem in my class I’d help with, but I don’t want to advertise my weakness to people who might not listen in good faith.
One of the things I’d like to think about as part of a blogging rhetoric is this “good faith” contract we seem to have with our readers. As long as it’s upheld on both sides, the whole thing can continue. If either the readers or the writers act in bad faith, the blog falls apart.
What’s created, then, is a kind of prisoners’ dilemma. When the power to derail a blog is in the hands of basically anyone who reads or writes for it, the temptation to do so can be overwhelming, especially if that blog is significantly read.
Eek, just mentioning such a thing gives me shivers. Of course, it’s really amazing that the good-faith contract is upheld as well and as long as it is.
But with all this metablogular talk, I haven’t seen much in the way of a real, useful rhetorical analysis of academic blogging that could be accessed and understood by those who have experience with blogs and by those who need to be convinced that “the internet” is the present of academic discourse, not just the future.
This would be a really helpful thing. One of the things I like best about academic blogs is the strong emphasis on intellectual individualism. In the past, this has been tied to the “anti-theory” trend, but it may well be that that particular framing was somewhat incidental. Speculative thinking (or theorizing) and blogging can actually work well together.
A rhetorical analysis along the lines you’re suggesting would hopefully address the individualist pose that is such an important feature of humanities academic blogging.
Thank you, Carrie, much to think about here: and I’m speaking as that person who had the nerve to speak up at the MLA Berube panel (and got shot down—spat that!)—in large part, because of the way I (mis)worded my question to suggest I was interested in “credit” of some kind for my own silly little blog, when I meant for “my blog” and “my tenure file” to refer metonymically to the “process and technology of blogging” and “concepts of academic labor and value” (respectively), indeed to the ways in which blogging not only represents our work, but also reshapes and reforms it, to foreground the provisional and the collaborative over the unimpeachable and the individual.
I’m going to think some more about the details you’ve presented here, before I proceed (perhaps still feeling the sting of Berube’s barbs, and those that followed online, I want to take the chance I now have to measure my words carefully. . .).
I have nonetheless grown to believe that the word “blog” itself substantially limits the discussion, in that, for many, it still codes for “online diary”—in which case, I fully understand the resistance of those who do not wish to have their colleagues evaluating their “blogs,” thus defined. And I do honor—and enjoy—the forms of individualism we do witness on academic blogs, and will give some thought to how such constructs differ rhetorically from those of conventional publication.
More soon, and thanks again.
And btw, I teach at Queen’s University, in Ontario. As my Queen’s is not well known south of the border, people often think we must work together. (And maybe we shall, in other borders of our own making, no?)
A rhetorical analysis along the lines you’re suggesting would hopefully address the individualist pose that is such an important feature of humanities academic blogging.
This is what I’m hoping, Amardeep. What I love best about rhetorical theory is that it steps away from the question of what subjects are to be valued (or politicized, or avoided, etc.) and simply asks how we can organize whatever we choose to write about more effectively. It does so not by prescribing, but by offering options based on the past relative success of various models. In effect, a good rhetorical theory of academic blogging would allow for a great deal of individualistic input (comment-centered or essay-centered? pre-professional writing or para-professional? etc.) and yield a number of possible rhetorical models.
Earlier, I was walking around thinking about experimental writing and how it seems to work best when it’s clear the author knows exactly what experiment she’s performing. Kathy Acker came to mind, and then Donald Barthelme, who both are writing outside of typical narrative structures, but clearly have their own in mind. (I love Barthelme’s Not-Knowing, essays on how one structures writing while not bowing to any existing structure.) A lot of us may feel this blog thing is something we’re making up out of thin air--writing a sentence that’s followed by another. But the best blog writing borrows structures from essay, narrative, diary, journalism, speech, joke, filmic montage, theater, and so forth, and makes some other thing with that.
Now what is that thing?
Gwynn, I’m tempted, of course, to say that your getting “shot down” has much less to do with you than with the paranoia surrounding blogs and the amount of justification any of us has had to do to defend it.
We’re still living in a time when we say we blog in hushed tones, or, as I tend to in mixed company, say I write for a “website.” As you suggest, the Livejournal model is still with us.
In other media, “high” and “low” production is often distinguished by the format. If you write novels, do they come out in hardcover? Then, if they make it into octavo-sized paperbacks, it means you’re not only of some literary merit; you’re also popular! If your writing goes straight to duodecimo “mass market” paperbacks, you’re another kind of author.
For blogs, there isn’t that kind of formal separation between “high” and “low” blogging. The Marxist in me says we should be proud to share a format with teens and homemakers, but the academic in me doesn’t want the “Livejournal” baggage when I go on the market. We’re stuck between our populist pride and the shame caused by academic ambition.
I’m guessing that tension is part of the intensity of the response to your question. Thoughts?
Well, one thing you could do is to take a look at what Michael Bérubé did at his blog. More or less on general principle I’d say he had 3-6 different kinds of posts, where the distinctioins have to do both with subject matter and when rhetorical strategies. These in turn generated different kinds of comments. The major distinction, however, is probably between “Arbitrary But Fun Fridays” and all the rest.
The ABFF posts could start out just about anyway, but they always meandered around to an open-ended question put to the commentariat. That question generally had to do with pop-culture trivia. So, one’s comment took the form of an answer to the question. The point is that here the stakes are low. It doesn’t take much effort to generate an answer, or even ten if it happens to be in one of your personal trivia troves. And nothing much depends on the answer; there are no big political issues, liberal arts and universty issues, or lit issues in play. So the ABFF question is a pretext for play, which often included playing at arguing with one another.
Now “fun” is not what academic blogs are about. We may go for wit and snark, but those are spices wheas fun is the water in which all else floats. For all I know Bérubé may have come up with the practice simply to give himself and easy Friday. But those ABFFs were a very important part of the ecology of that blog.
Of course, one might say, “yeah, but that’s just Bérubé.” Well, no. It’s a technique. Anyone can use it. No doubt there’s a measure of skill in the set-up and the choice of question. But such things can be learned and adapted, etc.
Carrie: “Bérubé’s paper at the above-mentioned panel was striking to me in that it exclusively discussed the kind of high-speed, soul-killing spat behavior that kills good blogs dead every day,
[...] I haven’t seen much in the way of a real, useful rhetorical analysis of academic blogging that could be accessed and understood by those who have experience with blogs”
Unfortunately, it looks like I’m never going to get to read Bérubé’s presentation—I blithely assumed that everyone going to that panel would put their talk on their blogs, and that turned out not to be true for 2 1/2 of the four people (John Holbo put up a draft). But, since you’re into rhetorical analysis and the purpose of writing, I’d say that you seem to be on a bit of the wrong track with “One of the things I’d like to think about as part of a blogging rhetoric is this “good faith” contract we seem to have with our readers. As long as it’s upheld on both sides, the whole thing can continue. If either the readers or the writers act in bad faith, the blog falls apart.”
The thing is that “disruptive” “bad faith” people are generally just not agreeing to your purpose. I have functioned at times as both troll and (usually just as disruptive) person trying to get rid of trolls, and the troll has their own rhetorical purpose. I don’t think that you can assume that by the act of reading your blog, the reader is committed to an implicit good faith contract in which they agree to participate as you would like them to.
Not recognizing this means that blog writers often put too much effort into trying to make people “reform”—to getting them to agree to whatever the good faith contract is supposed to be for that blog. (For they differ, at least in detail.) I think that recognition and quick banning is a better solution for setting the limits of what kind of conversation you want to that particular blog. The truly destructive sin of the troll is not go away when banned, and to come back through a different screen name.
But a lot of high-speed blog spat is inter-blog. These often start with someone attacking someone else on their blog, and not thinking that it will escalate, as if the cozy personal shell around their blog somehow makes it impossible for anyone else to read writing that is, after all, being broadcast worldwide for the purpose of having people read it. People seem to get into the mode of gossiping to friends on their blog, and then are disturbed to find that they have been publishing a broadsheet. There’s a real rhetorical mismatch there.
Of course, sometimes the inter-blog spat is started intentionally. In those cases, there’s not much to do other than to assert the wider non-blogging context as fast as possible, and treat it as any other public dispute.
Welcome to the Valve, by the way!
Bill, I like the idea of “play” here, as it is part of creating the kind of good-faith community I’m talking about, which leads into Rich’s comment about the value of bad-faith interactions.
Personally, I’m quite put off by bad-faith commenting on academic blogs, in that I figure if someone isn’t interested in the problems I’m working with or even finds them troubling, I’m not sure what disrupting the conversation is supposed to do. The reader who doesn’t like the problem can (1) read something else, (2) email the author with challenges to the approach, (3) comment in a way that might disrupt but at least inspires a thoughful response from the author. Most bad-faith commenting I’ve seen is the sort that doesn’t even allow the author to admit she might have been wrong; instead, it backs her into a corner from which she can only delete or rant. The only rhetorical purpose I can see of the troll is to momentarily turn over the cart, but it rarely stops the sale of apples.
You’re right, of course, about the interblog nature of most bad-faith reading, and it is much more malevolent, I think, than trolling. This kind of spat behavior is what Michael was talking about at the panel. What seemed to disturb him most was how, instead of engaging the author of a distasteful comment or post on the same page, a reader would copy a line, usually out of context, and put it on another blog in another context while whipping up a group of readers in rage about it. (This kind of behavior seems even worse, to me, on listservs than on blogs, where the illusion of having a private conversation leads people to say unbelievably horrible things about one another.)
Rich, I’d love to read a good defense of trolling, if you have one, if only because it’s the one part of blogging I’ve never been able to understand personally. Plenty of people I deeply respect consider trolling a major part of what they do, and I’d like to get to know why.
A defense of trolling? It would be difficult, because there probably are as many reasons as trolls. It’s more that trolls generally are trying to do something, they just aren’t trying to do the same thing as you are. Take the “momentary turning over of the cart”, for instance; by this the troll causes the blogger to acknowledge the troll’s existence as example of a distinct viewpoint—one which can not be absorbed into the prevailing ethos of the blog, which the troll may object to in toto. In most cases, a blog has central assumptions that you simply can’t be willing to disagree with without becoming a troll; if I comment on a libertarian blog, I become a troll; I assume that if you commented on a white power racist blog, you’d be a troll, no matter how resolved you were to be restrained in an attempt to be convincing. But it need not be anything as almost-reasonable as that—if you like the idea of “play”, then I’d have to say that children often play by disrupting each other’s games.
Classic trolls in rhetoric: Thersites (Odysseus has no real answer to his argument, other than to beat him up, still, it was necessary for the purpose of the war that he be beaten up), Servetus (provoking Calvin to have him burned at the stake by repeatedly writing to him (using new pseudonyms each time, I think) and sending back a copy of Calvin’s book with nasty marginalia in it makes him the patron saint of trolls).
This is a good start, Rich, and it sounds pretty accurate to me, given the trolls I’ve experienced. Some of it is about wanting attention, some about expressing dissent, and some about playfulness. And all of it probably inspires a desire for violent retribution, though it’s less possible to do so online.
"a blog has central assumptions that you simply can’t be willing to disagree with without becoming a troll”
An interesting suggestion… what are the Valve’s central assumptions? What is its ‘prevailing ethos’?
Conrad: “what are the Valve’s central assumptions? What is its ‘prevailing ethos’?”
Liberal academicity, in the sense that any position can be held, as long as it is a position. The Theory trolls that I used to more often see usually held to a performative academopolitics, in which holding certain positions was deemed tantamount to political action and therefore called out the “action” of heated writing in response. The trolls that we get these days are more likely to be playing out internal scenarios in which social links, grudges, and blowing off steam are of the highest importance, and other people are considered friends, enemies, etc. in a sense pretty much unrelated to what they write. Lastly, of course, there are the garden-variety trolls who fail the basic tests of coherence and non-rantiness.
Carrie: “And all of it probably inspires a desire for violent retribution, though it’s less possible to do so online.”
Well, on the principle that most people seem to mix up emotions at some basic level, are there really many other occasions in which an academic blog inspires desire? I could easily understand someone wanting to participate in such a strong emotional response, even though it’s negative.
Question: Do academic bloggers meta-blog more often than non-academic bloggers?
Answer: Undoubtedly, yes.
But do academic whatever-ers tend to reflect on the nature of their whatevering more often than non-academic whatever-ers? It wouldn’t surprise me; isn’t that sort of reflexivity inbuilt?
a blog has central assumptions that you simply can’t be willing to disagree with without becoming a troll
IOW, Habermas was wrong, oder?
A trackback, because I’m a bad person.