Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

Acknowledgements Prologue. Covey's Daughter and Her Dilemma Introduction. From Self-Made to Belabored 1. From Calling to Vision: Spiritual, Secular and Gendered Notions 2. From Power! to Personal Power!: Survivalism and the Inward Turn 3. From Having It All to Simple Abundance: Gender and the Logic of Diminished Expectations 4. The Self at Work: From Job-Hunters to Artist-Entrepreneurs 5. At Work on the Self: The Making of the Belabored Self 6. All You Can Be, or Some Conclusions Appendix. Some Notes on Method Notes Bibliography

Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy

The task of criticism is not to bring out the work's relationship with the author, nor to reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather, to analyze the work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its internal relationships. Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, one must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The author's name is a proper name, and therefore it raises the problems common to all proper names. It would seem that the author's name, unlike other proper names, does not pass from the interior of a discourse to the real and exterior individual who produced it. An anonymous text posted on a wall probably has a writer— but not an author. The author-function is therefore characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society.

What Is an Author

Our field has become riddled with dichotomies that threaten to undermine our holistic understanding of writing. Form and content (and the related form and function, text and context), product and process, individual and society-these dichotomies too often define our research affiliations, our pedagogies, and our theories. If we are to understand writing as a unified act, as a complex whole, we must find ways to overcome these dichotomies. Recent conceptions of genre as a dynamic and semiotic construct illustrate how to unify form and content, place text within context, balance process and product, and acknowledge the role of both the individual and the social. This reconception of genre may even lead us to a unified theory of writing. The most recent understandings of genre derive from the work of several significant theorists working with different agendas and from different fields: from literature (M. M. Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques Derrida), linguistics (M. A. K. Halliday, John Swales), and rhetoric (Carolyn Miller, Kathleen Jamieson). However, this work has not yet widely influenced how most scholars and teachers of writing view genre. Our reconception will require releasing old notions of genre as form and text type and embracing new notions of genre as dynamic patterning of human experience, as one of the concepts that enable us to construct our writing world. Basically, the new conception of genre shifts the focus from effects (formal features, text classifications) to sources of those effects. To accommodate our desires for a reunified view of writing, we must shift our thinking about genre from a formal classification system to a rhetorical and essentially semiotic social construct. This article will explain the new conception of genre that is developing and will suggest some effects of this new conception on our thinking about writing.1

Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept

Weblogs (“blogs”), frequently modified webpages containing individual entries displayed in reverse chronological sequence, are the latest mode of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to attain widespread popularity. As with other new CMC technologies, blogs have been hailed as democratizing—any literate person can self-publish content in a blog, and reach an audience of potentially millions, for little or no cost. Moreover, the success of individual blogs in attracting readers and influencing opinion depends less on their formal credentials than on the quality of their ideas and their writing (what Winer, 2003, calls their "voice"). Certainly blog authors are numerous: In the five years since the introduction of the first free web-based blogging tools (Pitas and Blogger; Blood, 2002b), the number of people creating and maintaining blogs has grown exponentially, from fewer than 100 to over four million (Henning, 2003). Anecdotal accounts also suggest that they are diverse: the mainstream media have reported on popular blogs authored by individuals as varied as university adjuncts, dark horse candidates for political office, and a gay Iraqi dissident (McCarthy, 2003). As yet, however, there has been little empirical examination of the claim that blogs are “democratic,” or that blog authors represent diverse demographic groups.

Pros and Cons: Negotiating Value in Blog Culture

References

Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy

What Is an Author

Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept

Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs

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