Blogs

A sign from my nursery that still hangs in my bedroom at my parents' house (click for larger image, and feel free to make fun of the glorious 1970s wallpaper if you like):

That last one was just a holiday design, really. I think I'll hang on to this one for a while; I like it. The image comes from Dangerous Love, #6 of the Sweet Valley High series (book cover image attached below the fold).

Last night, I got back from Alabama, and I'm still trying to catch up on sleep, run errands, finish my syllabus, etc. I'm working (mentally) on several posts, so more soon.

Rather relaxed night at a friend's apartment:

J, walking into the room: Are you guys watching Hee Haw?

M: No, this is an infomercial for Hee Haw on DVD.

I'm pleased to see that the new issue of Lore is out, which features the Digressions section on academic blogging. I've got a brief essay in there, and if you'd like to respond to it, please feel free to do so here. I'll probably be posting responses to some of the other essays here too; I don't have time right now to read them, but several of them sound intriguing. I'll probably start with Dennis's piece.

UPDATE: Responses from Torill and Kristine.

I'm still in the luverly South. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

WHY do the Priester's honey glazed pecans have to be so good that I eat almost the whole bag?

So yeah, that's what I've been doing today: eating, reading, knitting, watching TV, and hanging out with family and friends. Good stuff.

I don't have cable, so when I'm home, I OD on it. Not the History Channel, Discovery Channel, Learning Channel. Oh no. I watch E! and Comedy Central, and sometimes Spike TV. Today I've been indulging in Comedy Central's Mad TV marathon and E!'s year-in-review ranking specials, e.g. Top 10 Entertainers of 2004, Top 10 Celebrity Scandals, etc. I'm very pleased to see that Jamie Foxx has been getting a lot of recognition this year for playing Ray Charles in the biopic based on Charles' life. I've been a fan of Foxx for many years now; I thought he was hilarious on In Living Color, and I thought his performance in Ali was underrated.

Unfortunately, I haven't been able to catch an episode of Most Extreme Elimination since I've been here. Pity.

At AoIR 2003, in a roundtable on qualitative internet research, Annette Markham said (my paraphrase):

We need to place our research in history; ahistoricity is a problem. Go to other researchers' work even if you're working with a new technology--other researchers have already thought through epistemological and theoretical problems.

A sensible statement, one to which I don't think many people would object, but still, I came across a nice illustration of this claim and would like to share it. Rhetoric, Community, and Cyberspace, an article about MOOs, was written by James P. Zappen, Laura J. Gurak, and Stephen Doheny-Farina, published in 1997, but based on research they did in Fall 1994 during a ten-week colloquium in the Diversity University MOO. It struck me that one could pretty easily substitute the word "weblog" for "MOO" in this passage, that the issues and questions raised continue to be quite relevant (last paragraph of the article):

Traditional rhetoric focuses its attention upon a single rhetor (or perhaps single rhetors each in turn) seeking purposefully and intentionally to persuade an audience within a single community upon the basis of shared beliefs and values. We found in our colloquium in the MOO a kind of rhetoric and a kind of community that seem to us to be quite unlike anything that we see in the mainstream of the tradition--a rhetoric and a community characterized by a multiplicity of languages and perspectives and a consequent challenge to the rhetor to find the opportune moment to enter into and influence the course of a discussion. Though we recognize the current limits to the access and use of this technology, we nonetheless believe that the MOO has potential to become a contemporary rhetorical community--a public space or forum--within which local communities and individuals can express themselves and develop mutual respect and understanding via dialogue and discussion, and we believe that the graduate students who participated with us in our colloquium demonstrated this possibility through their own positive action in making this space their own. Given the potentially global reach of the MOO, we also believe that it has potential not only to transmit information across time, space, and cultural differences but more especially to provide a forum for dialogue and discussion among people of vastly different cultural backgrounds and beliefs, to become, if we choose to make it such, a contemporary rhetorical community in cyberspace.

Chuck has alerted me to the fact that my blog is listed on Amazon. I wonder if anyone has written reviews of the blogs, and I'm also curious to see if blogs will be added to the dropdown menu for Amazon's search function and integrated with books, CDs, DVDs, etc. in Amazon's recommendation system. It could, perhaps, be a good thing for those of us seeking some kind of recognition in academia for blogging.