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Articles Conference Reviews |
2007104MorrisSession 10.4: Blogging, News Communities, and Rhetoric
Steve Krause (Eastern Michigan University), Robin Murphy (Bowling Green State University), Kimberly Lacey (Wayne State University) Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University: “Situation, Exigence, and Blogging: The EMU-AAUP Faculty Strike of 2006 and the Birth of EMUtalk.org” EMUtalk.org is a website that was began by Steve Krause after the Fall 2006 Faculty Strike at EMU to be a place where EMU community members can talk about issues pertinent to them. It is a blog, rather than a messageboard, and requires registration for people to make posts for others to respond to. Krause wanted to examine the start of this blog (after discussing the strike on his own blog) and how it could be examined rhetorically. Krause began, then, by looking at blogs through the lens of the rhetorical situation, and by considering them to be “writerly” spaces. Writerly, for him, is both an adjective and an adverb that implies a sense of writing as a process—both the official “writing process” and the means by which people actually write. He went on to define his sense of the rhetorical situation—pulled from Bitzer and focusing not on triangles but instead on being sure to not leave out exigence (particularly, he compared message and exigence to chicken and egg). He moved from these basic focuses and definitions to talking about EMUTalk.org. After his personal blog became a community discussion place of the strike, Krause opened a new site (off EMU’s servers) that could be used to continue this and future discussions and collaborations, while also reclaiming his own blog for his own purposes (a writerly pursuit, he informed us). The site averages about 210 hits with 600+ page views per day. The posters mostly stay on topic, with little help from Krause (he calls himself the “sitedad”). The site is a place where students, staff, faculty, and the community can discuss things like a recent death on campus, upcoming events, and issues from the University Senate. Students have commented that friends from the University of Michigan wish that they had something similar for their own school; others felt that it made them more a part of the community than anything that had happened on campus since they came to EMU. Krause feels that EMUTalk.org responded to an exigence that the EMU community believed they had—to have a place to discuss issues openly. It “rewards contributors writerly instincts to produce and publish texts” (6). Some posters, however, feel that the site gets “bogged down” in negatives like the death on campus and doesn’t do enough to promote the good things about EMU to outsiders who might be viewing it while choosing a college. One poster also noted what Krause later described as their own sort of feedback loop—writers take exigence and like to write, readers like to read, and people on blogs bend situations to their own means. Krause thinks that some of the posters on the site that are far more involved than others are keeping some people from getting involved at all. I don’t think this is particularly unusual, the “in group” on any site I’ve been a part of has done that on any message board, blog, or forum I’ve ever been a part of. However, Krause does give a reason for this occurring, and noted that perhaps too many people were applying an analog rhetorical situation to a digital one—and left them feeling unable to break out of the one message, one communicator, one audience triangle. In conclusion, Krause is now seeking ways to manipulate the rhetoric of numerous authors and the site itself to welcome a multitude of voices rather than just a chorus of the same people over and over again. Krause’s presentation can be found at: http://krause.emich.edu/candw2007/Krause-emutalk-withpicts.pdf Robin Murphy, Bowling Green State University: “The Damaged City Space of 9/11 as Rhetorical Space” Murphy looked at two music videos as places to begin to initiate conversation about 9/11 and other world events in the composition classroom, when students would ordinarily be loath to talk about them. The videos she brought in (and had performed rhetorical analysis on) were by Linkin Park and Yellowcard. The Yellowcard video was shown first, and was particularly interesting because it seemed to have been made by a fan, putting clips of 9/11 to a song (“Believe”). The Linkin Park video was actually the most recent one made by the band and uses a series of clips to represent problems like pollution, war, rape, abortion, and so on. She discussed how these music videos begin to shape the way we see or understand a place, and help the audience to look at social issues when they may not have experienced them personally. I believe this isn’t a bad idea—music videos are short, by definition, and easier to spend class time on than entire movies. They ask students to be collectively aware of issues rather than being able to write them off as “history.” I think this might actually be a way to approach some lessons in my own classroom in the future, since my students are often unable to articulate things like who we fought in WWI or II, which makes it difficult for them to understand why the word “War” means different things to different generations. There are many such videos available on YouTube, so searching one for whatever space a teacher wants to discuss would be relatively simple. Murphy also believes (through Halloran) that public knowledge of place—through music videos—can initiate public discourse, and could be used to invite students to make more videos about topics that are important to them. Kimberly Lacey, Wayne State University: “The Enforcement of E-Masculinity” Lacey began her presentation with a story. In her class, each student makes a blog, which are then linked to one another so that all students can read each others’ blogs. This seems like a very standard set-up. Lacey went on to explain though how surprised she was that gender performance was extraordinarily linked to blogging in her class, more so than is usually seen on the internet at large. She noted that the males in her class picked themes that they saw as masculine or at least neutral, the females liked to use lots of pink, and the males were likely to make lots of posts about their favorite action movies, what women they thought were hot, and other posts not related to the course. She felt these posts had a lot to do with e-ppearance—the way students had to reassert their gender online and constructed an online persona was interesting to her. She connected this phenomenon to Butler’s theories of gender performance. In both virtual and non-virtual spaces gender is culturally defined. Lacey noted that gender online is relatively static in blogs, which was in contradiction to the way that people can redefine their own gender and race in places like MySpace where changing it is as easy as changing a radio button on your profile page. In blogs, Lacey said, gender is made once—through color, through a post, through language—and always afterward becomes static. Because posts can be read through an archive, a single post that screams loud and clear “I am a man!” will forever be available for the general audience of the blog. Yet, some of her students continued to reassert their male-ness. She noted that gender in online spaces like these is more like sex—unchangeable without the surgery (removing the “I am male hear me roar!” post).
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