Blogging

Another one to add to the blog dream series. This one's a recurring dream in times of stress, and I suspect this latest flare-up is related to my imminent preliminary exams. For context: In Drupal admin mode, I can see what people search for in my archives, and in my referrer logs, I can see which Google queries lead to my blog. Well, in the dream, mysterious people send me threatening messages this way. I go to "administer," and I see searches for "I want to kill you" and all kinds of other horrible stuff. Then I go to my referrer logs, and there are all these Google searches for stuff like "Clancy must die," etc.

All right, now I've sufficiently creeped you out. :-) I didn't mean to, as one of my students says, harsh your mellow. Now I'm expecting some facetious archive search queries, such as "You need help."

Recently, I was interviewed for an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press on parents' weblogs. The story was published today if you'd like to read it. Free registration is required, but here's my info:
Email: abstractgroove@lycos.com (my $p@/\/\ dump, by the way)
Password: citysong (one of the songs on this morning's dance playlist)

Looks like I'm not the only one who dreamed about Chun.

We've gone live. Here's the official release note:
Announcing---

Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community, and Culture of Weblogs
ed. Laura Gurak, Smiljana Antonijevic, Laurie Johnson, Clancy Ratliff, and Jessica Reyman, University of Minnesota

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. The collection takes a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others.

Into the Blogosphere is a first in many ways. Along with its being the first scholarly collection focused on the blog as rhetorical artifact, the editors also offer an innovative approach to intellectual property and to publishing. There are a number of peer reviewed journals in digital format. However, with an edited collection, the desired outcome is usually a hard-copy book, so the standard process has been to turn to a publisher with a proposal, then typically wait several years before the book actually comes out.

I told Charlie about this dream I had the other night, and he thought it was odd--and VERY geeky. He encouraged me to post about it, so here goes: I dreamed that I went to my admin menu in my blog, then to accounts, then to permissions. I gave the following permissions to all registered users:

create pages

create php content

create stories

create url aliases

edit own blog

edit own pages

edit own stories

But I didn't announce it here; I wanted to see if people noticed that they had the new options the next time they logged in. After I changed the permissions, I went to sleep (in the dream). Then (in the dream) I woke up and shuffled over to the computer as I always do right after I make my bed. I called up my blog and was horrified at what I saw: Tons of people had posted all kinds of random stuff--extreme neoconservative pontification, hate speech, pr0n, you name it. And there were 27 comments under every post. I immediately changed the permissions back and set about deleting all the evidence of my failed experiment.



Charlie thinks it's strange that I dream about the web. I dream about it all the time. Back when the Ms. message boards were still around, I dreamed about some of the posters on there, even though I'd never met them. They'd just find their way into my dreams somehow, most of the time taking non-human forms. One in particular was a big glob of primordial ooze. Anyone else dream about the web, or about your blog?

Jason Kottke has some thorough coverage of the Plain Layne hoax, which has also been reported in City Pages. There was a discussion about taking bloggers at face value over at Lauren's some time ago too. The basic rundown: Odin Soli, a 35-year-old man living in Woodbury, Minnesota, kept a blog as Plain Layne, a young woman with a tumultuous life. From the City Pages article:

Despite the moniker, Layne was anything but plain. Within the past few months, she recounted a rape that she suggested led her to lesbianism, became engaged to a formerly straight woman, suffered a dramatic breakup with said woman (partially because her fiancée resented being dissected on Layne's site), hooked up and noisily quarreled with a girl from her work cafeteria, met her birth parents for the first time, got involved with a risky internet startup, and had a ton of hot sex (which, because of her linguistic flourishes, was often hottest when solo). All that while keeping up a high-volume website of 5,000 unique visitors per day and middle-managing an IT group for "Minicorp," a large pseudonymous company that from her descriptions sounded like 3M or Cargill or Honeywell. In short: Anaïs Nin, I'd like you to meet William Gibson.

In addition, Layne had profiles on Orkut and Friendster. I'm following the discussions of Layne because I'm still thinking about how to defend the kind of research I want to do against those who look askance at internet research--against what I call the authentication imperative. Arguments have been made that there's a degree of fiction in every representation of self online; you're always only presenting a part of yourself. I'm not sure how persuasive they are for a lot of people, though. Does Turkle discuss this issue in Life on the Screen? What other internet researchers have written about the authentication imperative?

Update: More at Netwoman and at Trish's place.

John Lovas has posted an excellent overview of blogging. I must make one correction, though: John writes, "One of Clancy's many ground-breaking moves has been to post the answers to her doctoral exams on her blog, letting the rest of us in on her integration of important reading in Rhetoric and Composition." Thanks, but I don't think I've made any ground-breaking moves, particularly not this one--the first (and only) person I know of to post her preliminary exams is the brilliant Cristina Hanganu-Bresch. That being said, I'll post mine when I take them, which will be in early August.

Today I've been poring over pages and pages of past preliminary exam questions and devising my own to send to my committee for consideration. Most of the questions are derived from the old exams, slightly tweaked to accommodate my interests. I wrote a few of them myself. Any suggestions? [Edited to add links to the reading lists: rhetorical theory and tech comm theory and research. Gender and CMC list is coming.]

Rhetorical Theory

1. Consider Cicero's De Oratore as a response to Plato's critique in the Gorgias.
2. What does Cicero mean by “eloquence”? Does the concept have implications for the understanding and teaching of rhetoric today?
3. Select two canonical works by classical male theorists, e.g. Gorgias's “Encomium of Helen,” Plato's Gorgias or Phaedrus, Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore, and indicate how you would teach them from a feminist perspective. In each case, indicate why you are doing what you do.
4. Select two canonical works by modern theorists, e.g. Burke's Rhetoric of Motives, Habermas' “What Is Universal Pragmatics?”, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca's The New Rhetoric, Bakhtin's “The Problem of Speech Genres,” and indicate how you would teach them from a feminist perspective. In each case, indicate why you are doing what you do.
5. Burke directly addresses technology as a social commentator, a philosopher, and a rhetorical theorist. Discuss his approach to technology in each of these roles and comment on its importance to rhetoric as practiced by bloggers.
6. What theoretical concepts within the rhetorical tradition are most important to the creation of an adequate rhetorical theory of blogging practices? What, if any, traditional concepts does this new technology render obsolete? (More detailed treatment of fewer concepts is preferred to less detail and more concepts.)
7. Assume that nothing of the Aristotelian corpus survived except the Rhetoric and that we knew nothing of Aristotle's political views. Agree or disagree with this statement: “It is difficult to imagine a theory of rhetoric less congruent with modern feminism(s) than that set forth in the Rhetoric.” Defend your view by making specific reference to Aristotle's text.