Reconstruction 6.4 (2006)
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Why I Blog: Part 1 | Part 2
The following bloggers were requested by Reconstruction to post a blog on why they blog. The blog post title (in "quotes") is an external link to the blogger's full response.
Introductions written by Michael Benton.
Douglas Rushkoff
The Happy Tutor at Wealth Bondage
There's Something About Harry
Reappropriate
View From Iran
Prairie Mary
Global Culture
Mickey Z
Larval Subjects
Robert Chrysler of loveecstasycrime
Ferdy on Films
Nuts and Bolts
Writer Response Theory
Random Thoughts
Rebecca Blood on Rebecca's Pocket
Black Looks
Keepin' It Real, Yo
Geoff Klock’s Blog
Hotel Room Nudes
Mathemagenic
Chapati Mystery
Press Think: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine
Reassigned Time
Michael Bérubé
Masters of Media
Douglas Rushkoff
(New York, NY: USA)
Douglas Rushkoff his published books include media theory, graphic novels, Judaism, science fiction. He has also worked on the important Frontline documentaries "Merchants of Cool" (2001) and "The Persuaders" (2004). Douglas moderated list-serv Media-Squatters is also a great place to interact with other media theorists.
"I believe that the most dangerous thing about blogs to the status quo is that so many of them exist for reasons other than to make money."
The Happy Tutor at Wealth Bondage
(Corporate Boardrooms, Everywhere/Nowhere: USA)
Wealth Bondage is a great example of satirical blogging and here like so many wealth bondage celebrities the Happy Tutor decides he will retire forever... perhaps... (see the essay section of this issue for a tribute to The Happy Tutor)
"The internet feels at first like the public square, or town green, where we ordinary people can meet at will and make sport, make mock, dance, drink, hold festivals, express ourselves, make friends, find lovers, engage in fistfights, run around wearing silly masks as at Carnival, and generally call the official world of distinguished ladies and gentleman, the whole world of Wealth Bondage, into question."
There's Something About Harry
(Altlanta, Georgia: USA)
Harry's site is littered with ads and is this weird hybrid of self-promotion, advertising and self-expression. I'm resistant to the idea of for-profit blogging, but it is a reality of the blogosphere and Harry is a good example of what is out there (well at least one that responded)
"Blogging is an evolving online form. It has been around in multiple forms for several years. I see it evolving in an iterative fashion. Many of the attributes that led to financial success in blogging 2-3 years ago work today and many do not work as well. New metrics of success and new avenues for financial reward are being created on a weekly or monthly basis."
Reappropriate
(Toronto, Ontario: Canada)
"Reappropriate.com is a political, current events, and personal blog written from the perspective of a loud and proud Asian American woman." A beautiful design graces this refreshing combination of the personal and the political. Provides a fresh perspective both in its commentary and in its linkage/referencing. Check out Jenn's "about" section which gives you a good idea of her perspective and attitude.
"I fundamentally believe that the pursuit of knowledge is dependent upon the sharing of ideas. As an activist and an academic, I find that the best way to foster social change is by promoting thinking in all parties involved--including the activist. Ever since the development of the Internet, I saw a potential in websites; I thought that this was the solution the disenfranchised were looking for. Here was our opportunity to shine a light on the oppressed minority--self-publishing could allow us to bypass the oppression of society that threatens to silence us and make our voices heard."
View From Iran
(Tehran, Iran)
Emerald Tina is one of our essay authors for this issue and is a good example of the expatriate bloggers that Lauren Elkin writes about in her introduction to this section.
"The blog also records the process of being a complete foreigner to being a bit more (although not total) of an insider. I came to Iran with a few sentences of Persian and very little concept of tarof or anything else Iranian. I will leave with decent conversational skills, a fairly comprehensive understanding of tarof, and a bit more facility with Iranian culture as it is experienced in Iran."
Prairie Mary
(Valier, Montana: USA)
I first came across Prairie Mary on the ASLE list-servs when I was studying/teaching place-based issues. I was always impressed by her wide range of knowledge and her passionate involvement with political, spiritual and environmental issues. Take a look at her bio on the weblog: she has a degree in speech education, taught on a Blackfeet reservation for a decade, worked five years in Animal Control in Portland, then got an MA in Religious Studies and a MDiv, spent ten years working in ministry, later she did another stint for the City of Portland... in addition to her wide range of experiences and knowledge she has a comfortable and warm, yet complex, writing style.
"Ten Points for 'Reconstruction'"
"Blogging is halfway between dreaming and preaching. I usually have an idea to pursue or at least a theme, but I'm sometimes surprised by what comes onto my mind-screen. ... Words are my paint. The computer is my grand piano. I often have the impression as I sit here that this is the elephant-ivory and ebony keyboard of a piano. But I can SEE the "music" and revise it as much as I need to. Any art form demands practice and blogs are my scales."
Global Culture
(Toronto, Ontario: Canada)
I was introduced to Juan and his weblog through the collective worldwide blogging effort of Global Voices when I left an invitation at the site for contributions (GV was introduced to me by David Sasaki, one of our essay writers, and founder of the weblog El Oso, El Moreno, and El Abogado). Juan has set up Global Culture with the intention of developing it into a collective examination of global issues. Here is the description of the site: "This blog provides a discussion forum for people interested in migration, globalization and their impact in global culture, but our project goes beyond that."
In the response for this section he introduces us to a new concept and trend in blogging: "Bridge bloggers write for an audience outside their everyday reality"
Mickey Z
(New York, NY: USA)
I was introduced to Mickey Z through the teaching of two of his books that I used in my college courses: 50 American Revolutions You're Not Supposed to Know: Reclaiming American Patriotism and Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda (sent to me by another blogger).
Mickey's contribution was originally posted at Z-Net: "More specifically, it's the shrinking limits of debate within the corporate-dominated elite media that have inspired many a blogger. I know, in a land where freedom of the press is considered sacred and the media is usually portrayed as a collection of closet Leninists yearning to sacrifice Christian Coalition virgins on the altar of Fidel Castro, this rationalization may at first seem odd. However, once you recognize how narrow the parameters of media debate have become, independent blogs suddenly appear downright seditious."
Larval Subjects
(Not sure where it originates)
I first came across Sinthome's blog when I was researching the theories of Deleuze & Guattari, I returned often because of the way in which complex philosophical and psychological concepts/theories are carefully explained and explicated on this site. Every time I visit this site I happily get lost in the rarified philosophical discussions that seem to be missing from much of American culture. Sinthome's Lacanian dialogical perspective also encourages others to "engage" the ideas being discussed: " I adhere to the Socratic vision that philosophy should be premised on an encounter, preferably in public spaces, involving exchange and dialogue, and hopefully in such a way as to irritate the priests and the statesmen."
I asked Synthome to contribute this piece, even though it isn't directly explaining "why blog," because it develops the concept of "irritation" as a method that prods us on to re-think and re-visit and re-conceptualize. In this light I thought it might provide an insight into why so many of us blog: " Everyone knows that thought is a solitary activity, that concepts are always misunderstood when you attempt to share them, and that communication in the representational sense is impossible for all save mathematics. Rather, what the net enhances are our possibilities for being irritated, which in turn leads to further development of the structures underlying our thought. If I participate on emails lists, for instance, it is not to reach some sort of agreement, but to produce irritation within myself that will push my thought in unforseen communicative directions. I sing a hymn to gadflies, trolls, and cranks everywhere! May they be blessed and loved for upsetting the closure of my thought process and making me so uncomfortable."
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Robert Chrysler of loveecstasycrime
(Toronto, Ontario: Canada).
I first came across loveecstasycrime in my research/study of anarchist thought online. I returned often because of Robert's anarchist combination of political attitude with a poetic sensibility. Being political involves freeing the senses, the body and the mind: "All in all, do authority and money really regulate how lovers kiss or the taste for wine, or your dreams, or the smell of thyme on a mountainside, since they govern what they cost? If it is, and they do, then the world is turned upside down, and I want to set it right." The response below was posted at Get Underground.
"Camille Paglia, Blogs and the Decentralization of Meaning"
"One of the ways in which the ideological hegemony of late-stage capitalism is reproduced and maintained in any given society is through the monopolization of meaning and discourse. By strictly controlling the access to information available to its subjects, as well as the interpretation of it, elites are able to ensure the ideological conformity of those forced to live within an ontological landscape suited to the interests and desires of the dominant class. As that level of control becomes increasingly total, it begins to affect the culture as a whole at the very level of its imagination. No matter how bad things get, the creation of something different no longer even seems to be remotely possible. Whereas in the past the revolutionary mystique was something that always threatened to become manifest at any given moment and shake the foundations of class society, in modern times capitalism has become the king of that's just the way it is."
Ferdy on Films
(Illinois: USA)
I came across Ferdy's blog in my research for my film courses. Ferdy, like many film bloggers (for examples of film bloggers check out the essential resource Green Cine Daily), blogs extensively and eloquently on the world of cinema.
"I hoped to provide unique content by following my offroad approach to film viewing and analysis and thereby fill a need. I focus on every type of film, from every era and country, with a strong complement of reviews of silent films and documentaries, and a handful of overlooked current releases."
Nuts and Bolts
(Los Angeles, CA: USA)
Toggle Switch has always impressed me with how she can write so passionately about politics, then about family, then about a cultural controversy, then about a crazy adventure, then back to politics... and then there are these absurd posts that make me bust up laughing, like the recent "Holding My Breath."
"I discovered that I most enjoy writing for my blog when I have something to say that has touched me. Writing for quantity felt false. It is a visceral feeling I have that drives me to write. I need to write. Some of my posts are banal chatter, but I think there is a place for that in a blog, especially Nuts & Bolts."
Writer Response Theory
(Australia; Santa Barbara, CA; Riverside, CA)
"WRT, a blogging collective dedicated to the discussion and exploration of digital character art, was created in Fall 2004 by Christy Dena, Jeremy Douglass and Mark C. Marino." A great example of how we can bridge spatial distances and work collectively through blogging. The site has podcasts, a wiki and courses, along with a wealth of technological and theoretical information.
"We Revise Together: Blogging on Writer Response Theory"
Like their weblog this is a rich contribution that takes full advantage of the medium: "Yet by choosing the blog as the form of our investigation, We Readers Three did craft a kind of future for WRT - a wide-ranging discussion predisposed towards iterative exploration, in which we read to write and write to read. Rather than spending a cloistered year or two polishing the meaning of WRT for some triumphal publication, we discovered WRT in the process of doing it. Our meditations on topics of digital text technology were further enlivened and enriched by a constant practical engagement with our method--the text technology of blogware. Inspired by the daily distractions of spam-filtering ennui, statistics-tracking obsession, and plugin-juggling mania, we constantly wrote responses to newly discovered facets of the textual life"
Random Thoughts
(Virginia, USA)
"M" provides a mix of the cultural and personal.
"With time blogging has started taking on newer meanings for me. It is like having an extended family of readers who keep coming back to read, to comment and to make themselves heard. Every post is like a conversation, a discussion, a time frame that I can revisit over and over again. Before I started blogging I secretly harbored the desire to be a writer. I guess there's a little voice inside all of us that wants to be heard. And like most people that little voice thought the world needed to know what it had to say. And so I started blogging. When I blog it is like entering a world of my own, a world that I can paint in any hue, write about things that I believe in, and hope somewhere someone finds a reason to read it. The very same reason that I am searching for when I browse the internet to read other blogs."
Rebecca Blood on Rebecca's Pocket
I first came across Rebecca Blood on Douglas Rushkoff's listserv MediaSquatters. I remember she was working on developing an early book on blogging: The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog (2002). This book quickly established Blood's reputation as an expert on blogging and she has provided a history that maps out the development and mutation of blogs. I have included both of these early essays/posts as an example of that foundational work.
"Weblogs: A History and Perspective" (2000)
"These weblogs provide a valuable filtering function for their readers. The web has been, in effect, pre-surfed for them. Out of the myriad web pages slung through cyberspace, weblog editors pick out the most mind-boggling, the most stupid, the most compelling.
But this type of weblog is important for another reason, I think. In Douglas Rushkoff's Media Virus, Greg Ruggiero of the Immediast Underground is quoted as saying, ‘Media is a corporate possession...You cannot participate in the media. Bringing that into the foreground is the first step. The second step is to define the difference between public and audience. An audience is passive; a public is participatory. We need a definition of media that is public in its orientation.' By highlighting articles that may easily be passed over by the typical web user too busy to do more than scan corporate news sites, by searching out articles from lesser-known sources, and by providing additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary, weblog editors participate in the dissemination and interpretation of the news that is fed to us every day. Their sarcasm and fearless commentary reminds us to question the vested interests of our sources of information and the expertise of individual reporters as they file news stories about subjects they may not fully understand."
"Weblog Ethics" (2002)
"There has been almost no talk about ethics in the weblog universe: Mavericks are notoriously resistant to being told what to do. But I would propose a set of six rules that I think form a basis of ethical behavior for online publishers of all kinds. 1 I hope that the weblog community will thoughtfully consider the principles outlined here; in time, and with experience, the community may see the need to add to these rules or to further codify our standards. At the very least, I hope these principles will spur discussion about our responsibilities and the ramifications of our collective behavior."
Black Looks
(Granada, Spain)
I first came across Black Looks through Brown Femipower's Women of Color Blog. Sokari is one of the many bloggers worldwide who provide unique, personalized perspectives of their part of the world, and open up the narrow perspective of Americancentric bloggers (those who take the time to explore new voices/perspectives).
"Blogging From the Borders: My Blog and I"
"A starting point in reflecting on identity, blogging and me is to ask the question, "Where does my writing come from and where does it take me?" Where it comes from are my identities and where it takes me are to BL and all the other blogs I read regularly. Neither the blog nor my identities are mutually exclusive. For example in terms of race, gender and class, I can move between and within African, African European, mixed race growing up in privilege in Nigeria and mixed race living in Europe and Black 9-5 single parent in London. I also can find commonalities in an African American or a Chicana or Indian and white English experience. These are all very broad experiences and the aim is not to categorise them as this is not possible or meaningful but to show that there is a fluidity in my own identity that enables me to flow outside of a fixed set of identities. Likewise in terms of sexuality, I can move between lesbian, bi-sexual, gay , heterosexual experiences - all of these within a racial and class context."
Keepin' It Real, Yo
(Los Angeles, California: USA)
Daniel's blog is a mix of culture, politics, personal views and reports from La, La Land.
"I was recently asked why I blog, and I'm happy to oblige with a reply. First of all, you'll notice that I framed this as a request to ME instead of it being part of a larger project in which several bloggers will participate. This should give you some idea of where this post is going."
Geoff Klock's Blog
(Astoria, New York: USA)
Geoff Klock is the author of How To Read Superhero Comics and Why and the forthcoming Imaginary Biographies: Misreading the Lives of Poets. He also co-edited (with C. Jason Smith and Ximena Gallardo) and contributed an essay "X-Men, Emerson, Gnosticism" to the Summer 2004 issue of Reconstruction.
"Everyone needs to have a large discussion about the future of the University and the internet. If primary texts can be available on the web, for free, and academic essays and even books can be available in the form of blogs, for free, and if lectures by any professor can be recorded with a cell phone and thrown up on youtube, for free, then a very large part of an Oxbridge or Ivy League education can be had for free, at home, right now, by anyone with a decent computer connection."
Hotel Room Nudes
(San Diego, CA: USA)
D. Brian Nelson is an erotic photographer from my hometown. I came across his site while looking for blogs from SD to keep up on news and events back home (I'm currently in Lexington, KY). Nelson has a flair for photography, I like how he uses the black-and-white medium. In the ol' debate of art vs pornography--for me, his work is clearly of artistic value. His blog is a good example of the increasingly more popular photoblog and of a blog that is used for creative expression.
"Making photographs as objects gives me the same kind of satisfaction as machining a jewelry box of mesquite burl or chopping a motorcycle. For me there must be some creation, and right now it is the making of photographs. Something must be said about the subject of course. I photograph women, mostly nude sexual women, because I like women. I would photograph other subjects if models weren't available (and have), but as long as women want me to photograph them, I see no point in diversifying."
Mathemagenic
(Enschede, Netherlands)
Lilia Efimova contributed an essay to this issue that demonstrates the autoethnographic nature of much blogging. This post below demonstrates the amazing traces of her academic journey and the discoveries she has made along the way. As an academic blogger, and authoethnographic writer, Efimova demonstrates the power of blogs to record these traces and to link together the many processes/tactics/voices we use in developing our (larger) writings. Like Rebecca Blood above, Efimova provides us with a history of blogging, more personal perhaps, not as focused (which I find powerful in its diffusion), but it is a history of an academic blogging and the discoveries made along the way. I anxiously await the book!
"Researching Blogs and Blogging Research: Synergies of Colliding Worlds"
"It was when I finished that paper when I realised that while my insights were inspired by the answers I've got in the study, "connecting the dots" came not from the data, but from personal experiences of blogging. I started to look for ways to accommodate for that in my research, turning blogging into an ethnographic space."
Chapati Mystery
(Chicago, IL: USA)
Manan Ahmed is an academic blogger, part of the growing community of academics who see the value of blogging. In the introductory post below Ahmed outlines some issues of academic blogging, defines some terms, and introduces the reader to a series of well-known and respected academics who blog.
"The wrong definition for academic blogging would be, academics who blog [yes, tenured professor who have a needlepoint community on LiveJournal do not count as academic bloggers. a w00t for them, notwithstanding]. In my opinion, the criteria should be 1. whether the person is an academic by training/profession and 2. whether a significant portion of the blog represents the person's engagement with wider world of their academic or civilizational concerns."
Press Think: Ghost of Democracy in the Media Machine
(New York, NY: USA)
Jay Rosen is a journalism professor at New York University. I first came across his website when trying to research whether others were seeing that "The Myth of Objectivity" was complete BS and that the charges of "media bias" where ridiculous diversions. In my mind, nurtured by autoethnographic/qualitative theorists, I had always conceived of objectivity as this mythical place that you can never truly arrive at, but by being up front about your perspective (subjectivity) one could move closer to objectivity. Rosen's blog contains a series of posts on these subjects and other press related issues. What is refreshing about his blog is the in-depth posts, careful documentation of various threads from each post and the level of feedback that he receives.
"Blogging is About Making and Changing Minds"
"So while a good weblogger is constantly engaged with opinion, Doc says: don't get married. Wedded to your views, that is. Because the next link can not only change your mind, it can add wiring, add memory. Which then forces you to restate your views to see if they survive the new understanding. This is how good weblogs work. For the writers, for the readers, ‘blogging is about making and changing minds.' Sure, weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they're opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man, but just remember: it doesn't want to conclude."
Reassigned Time
(The Mythical Midwest: USA)
Dr. Crazy blogs pseudonymously about her life, students that drive her crazy, and cultural stuff.
"Voices"
"In all of these voices, there are similarities; there are points of convergence. And so there's something about blogging, I think, that has been incredibly valuable to my scholarly or professional writing, even though I don't tend to write in a substantive way about my scholarly or professional work, and I don't tend to post in detail about deadlines and what I'm doing and such. In other words, the blog has not been a mechanism of accountability for me, but a space that is in-between work-writing and personal-writing. And I think that has enabled me to develop a richer voice that translates into the work writing, if that makes sense."
Michael Bérubé
(Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: USA)
When I was a cultural studies MA Berube was a fierce, witty and intelligent voice in the cultural wars. He was a model for a revitalization of the critic as a committed public intellectual (at least for us cultural studies folk). Later while working on the PhD I had the opportunity to hang out with Michael at a couple of gatherings in Urbana/Champaign, IL and found him to be a sincere and generous person. You can usually tell a lot about an academic by the interactions they have with their students. There are the professors who like to intimidate their students, the professors who seek dutiful worshippers, the oblivious professors for whom teaching is an afterthought and the ones that want to be your good time buddy. As an outsider, it seemed to me that the students that circulated around Berube ( University of Illinois) were fiercely independent and critical--actively and passionately so. No doubt Berube encouraged this independent critical thought and it was clear that he viewed the learning experience as a central part of the entire life .
"Blogging: An Academic Question"
"That's certainly one of the reasons I've grown so fond of blogging, and I imagine that's one reason why (so far) I haven't lost too much academic prestige by indulging in this here medium, either. Most of the professors and graduate students who know about this humble blog have said very kind things about it, sometimes so emphatically as to threaten its status as a humble blog. But every so often someone says to me, with just a barely audible sneer, "I suppose you'll be putting this on your blog" or "is this a real talk, or just something from your blog?" and I've even heard one professor playfully insult another (not me this time), "oh, go tell it to your blog . . . and both your readers." Of course, most people who know me or my work know that I was pretty compromised on this score to begin with. "Well, no wonder Bérubé has a blog," they say. "He was already writing for newspapers, it was only a matter of time before he sank even further into the ‘public' muck." The idea, clearly enough, is that blogs lie somewhere on the respectability-spectrum between personal diaries and obsessive basement hobbies, and that while it's fine that you write about your life or build your model trains on your own time, you should at least be circumspect--if not positively sheepish--about doing it in public.
Masters of Media
(Amsterdam, Netherlands)
This is a collective blog inspired by Geert Lovink and run by University of Amsterdam New Media students. When I invited the collective to contribute to this section they offered a series of theoretical essays.
This section of the blog currently hosts five essays on the Philosophy of Blogging: "Plato's Republic: The decline of the state and the history of the World Wide Web"; "Dualism, Objectification and Gazing: A Philosophical View on Why Pro-Ana Blogs are so Succesful"; "Walter Benjamin and journalism in the age of electronic reproduction"; "‘Imagined Community' applied to weblogs"; and, "Surveillance - From Jeremy Bentham to Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to blogs"