The Uses of Blogging

It was a wonderful session, with a great q&a discussion session
afterwards, and it raised a lot of the issues I often think about when
I consider my own blogging and the phenomena of blogs generally—particularly
in terms of blogs and critical writing. And it helped me think about the various "functions" my own Misrule blog may fulfil in ways that I suspect I have unconsciously held dear, but haven't necessarily consciously explored as much as I should.

This may read as something of a disclaimer, and I suppose it is—but I do want to say that the session today was wide-ranging and quite complex in the ideas it covered, and much of what I write here somes from memory—I was too engaged with the discussion to take down as many notes as I should have. So I do hope that if anyone who attended the session, including and especially Stephanie and Kerryn, read this and find I have misremembered or misrepresented anything said, then I hope they will post a correcting comment.

I must also say that Kerryn emphasised that one of the netiquettes of blogging is that if you write a long post, you should do your reader the courtesy of warning them at the start. So, dear reader, this is a long post.

Kerryn, who keeps three blogs (here, here and here, plus she contributes to the Sarsparilla blog—does the woman ever sleep?!) said many really interesting things—I'll repeat a few of them here. She said that bogging represents a radical paradigm shift for reading and writing, a shift away from the producer/consumer paradigm we're used to in traditional publishing—that blogging is not the product but the practise. That blogging shortens the distance between interiority and the public realm.

In terms of critical writing (specifically, book reviews) Kerryn talked of the freedom of not having to conform to the word lengths and other limitations placed on the critic by journals and newspapers etc, but she said beyond that (I think I am remembering this correctly) she still conforms to the generic conventions of the genre. She also talked about the—I've forgotten the exact phrase she used, and dammit, I didn't note it down—but it was to do with the freedom that comes with not being paid to write your blog. (Kerryn, if you're reading this and can expand on this in the comments section, please do!)

One comment that Kerryn made which particularly struck me came from her assessment of an honours thesis written about infertility blogs (a huge sub-genre all of its own). She wrote about the fact that in the blogosphere, there are "no cultural gatekeepers doing quality control". I'll come back to this comment when I get to the q&a session.

Stephanie spoke about her blog (Humanities Researcher), which she said falls fairly and squarely in the "academic blog" category, but observed that when she was diagnosed with early stage breast cancer a year ago, her blog began to incorporate the personal into the professional, in that she wrote about her cancer from her point of view as an academic—an inquiring, almost theoretical approach. And she credited feminism with making this both possible and "acceptable" in a way it might not have been 20+ years ago. (Kerryn cheered!) She also said that her university encouraged her blogging, which is interesting in itself. (I'm not doing this justice—best you just go to Stephanie's blog and follow the thread for yourself.)

Both women spoke about their readers—who does and doesn't read their blog, who reads but never comments, the fact that not all readers "wish them well" (this came from Kerryn, who apparently has been cyber-stalked, which is pretty scary). The friends that resent they find out more about what's going in their lives from their blogs.

Kerryn also said that blogging has made writing easier for her. She said that she always found writing a very painful and difficult process—bleeding words onto the page—but that writing regularly for her blogs has made the process of writing easier. Amen!

I found myself nodding in agreement to much of what was said, but also finding Kerryn and Stephanie had thought much more deeply about some of those isses I mentioned cross my mind from time to time, and they gave me both food for thought and greater insights into blogging.

Returning to the "cultural gatekeepers" comment from Kerryn, one of the questions/observations came from an academic at UWS, who was concerned about the tension between the ease and speed of writing on/for the net (not just blogging but other forms of online social media) and the need, in academia, to be slow. This picked up on with what Stephanie said about academic writing being by nature slow—that it's all but impossible to write academic work quickly. The academic who asked the question was concerned that if students were encouraged to be engaged with online communication by the institution, how would that impact on the work that required a slow and painstaking process.

This really struck a chord with me, because it tallied with my own concerns about critical writing and the blogosphere—so I put my own question to Kerryn. I probably didn't express it with quite the clarity I'd have liked, so I hope I do better here.

Like Kerryn, I publish reviews and critical writing in specialist and other journals, but I also do a version of both here on Misrule. In my book "reviews" on Misrule (which I haven't done so much of lately, for various reasons) I am more informal and anecdotal and personal in my approach than I am in reviews for journals, as I think befits both the media and the process—but I adhere to the ethics and principals of reviewing that learned from doing my "apprenticeship" in the traditional print media. Long before blogging was invented, I made my start in reviewing and other critical writing by approaching journals, pitching proposals and presenting examples of my work to the editor. This process, which also included getting feedback from the "cultural gatekeepers" (The Horn Book is especially good at this) was vital, I think, in learning the craft and also understanding that you have a readership, and that there are responsibilities that go along with this.

It's easy to forget you have a readership when you're sitting at home blogging away. I don't mean to be disengenuous—of course we blog because we want to be read, but I am often taken by surprise when people approach me and say, I read your blog. Of course I know people read it, but I tend to think consciously only of the people I know read it—those readers who leave comments, by and large.

But the great advantage of the blog—and also a con—is its immediacy and, for want of a better word, democracy. Anyone can publish comment and opinion without restraint apart from the self-imposed. And that's all well and good, but—and I am entering dangerous generational waters here—there is indeed a whole generation whose only experience of publishing is the net. What do they call it?—technology natives, people who have not experienced life without the net, and who have only experienced the freedom it affords without the benefit of apprenticeship, of the guidance of the cultural gatekeepers.

I put this, in my question to Kerry, in context of my field, children's lit, explaining that probably partly due to the restricted opportunities of publishing reviews of children's books in the mainstream media, the children's book community has taken up the internet in general and the blog in particular with great enthusiasm. That there a masses of children's book dedicated blogs (often kept by children's librarians and similar professionals) and they do an awful lot of reviewing. And most of it is fine and keeps the discourse going and presents books well. But from time to time, you come across a review that is kind of breathtaking in its lack of understanding of the ethics and responsibilities of reviewing. Reviews that make astonishing and unsupportable assumptions about the creator of the book, that are factually incorrect and reveal the limited knowledge and experience of the reviewer, and that are often more about the reviewer, in fact, the the reviewed.

And, because of the very democratic nature of the internet, these reviews (may) carry the same "weight" and authority as the better-informed, in every sense, review by bloggers who have a better sense of the ethics of reviewing.

So Kerryn proposed the possibility that readers can make their own assessment as to the quality of the review, which is true to a point—but without meaning to sound elitist, readers of specialist journals and even readers of the book pages in the mainstream media arguably have greater skills in making such judgements because they are regular consumers of such material. What of the average internet user who might not, in the normal run of things, ever read a book review, but come across one simply by using a search engine? How are they to determine the quality of a pece of writing in a genre they don't usually read?

Teachers and librarians all know that one of the greatest challenges of the net is teaching users to assess the material on it. The authority/agenda of the writer. The quality of the information on a site, and so on. (This is at the fore-front of my own thinking at the moment as I am researching an article on the very topic for my day job.) So my cncern is, how is the ordinary user to distinguish between blog a and blog b?

This further complicated, I think, by the kind of pop-will-eat-itself nature of the net. Stephanie mentioned finding blogs that had lifted paragraphs from her own blog and posted them without attribution. And so reviews dashed off on a blog might end up anywhere on the net—on Amazon, or linked or quoted just about anywhere—and your average browser may have no way of knowing its provenance or its, again, authority.

Kerryn asked, rhetorically, does this mean we police the net? Well, no—we can't and we probably shouldn't. But like the afore-mentioned academic concerned about the effect of the process of writing for the net/blogosphere on academic writing, I also raised my concern about the long-term fall-back effect on critical writing in general by the ease of publishing and lack of editorial process allowed by the net.

I fear I sound like an intellectual luddite or snob or gen-x basher or even worse, a fear-monger. I don't mean to overstate what may not, after all, be a huge problem, but I keep coming back to the idea that the best writers of criticism and review (and I am not talking about myself here—I am all too aware of my own limitations in this field) don't just turn up out of nowhere. They learn and they serve and they, yes, bleed every word onto the page—and onto the computer screen.

OK, moving on.

A question was posed by another academic from UWS, who, I gather, teaches journalism, about the ethics of quoting blogs in an article—should the journalist always seek permission to do so? I thought the answer was pretty straightforward—of course you should seek permission—so I was very interested to hear that Stephanie felt that as her blog was basically in the public domain, it was fair game for such usage, and she didn't much care if permission was sought. Kerryn differed in that she argued that seeking permission was a professional courtesy, but agreed that if the material was out there in the public domain, then it was fine to be cited. Everyone agreed that appropriate attribution was essential.

Another fascinating thread (to use a blogging term) was the idea of the blogger's potential for "political intervention". This was also raised by Kerryn, and she gave as an example a post she wrote about the "great Patrick White scandal" of 2006. The "scandal", for those unfamiliar, was a beat-up by The Australian, who sent a chapter from White's novel Eye of the Storm to Australian publishers and literary agents, all of whom failed to recognise it and rejected it for publication. Kerryn's post was, if I recall correctly, subsequently reprinted by The Australian, the same paper that set up the "scandal" in the first place. This, she said, was an example of her blog post's function in terms of political intervention that she was particularly proud of.

I hadn't consciously thought of my own blog in these terms, but today's session provoked me to consider that I do have a "political" motivation in keeping the Misrule blog—and that motivation is, of course, partly to give myself a venue for publishing my own thoughts and opinions, but hopefully also to carve out a place for discourse, at a simultaneously informed and passionate level, about children's and youth literature, and the cultural space made available to the genre.

I have a post-script to add to this post about the effect on a blogger of having your blog reviewed in a well-respected journal, but it will have to wait until the review is available online. Stay tuned.

And finally, today's seminar gave me the opportunity to meet Ivor Indyk, which was worth the (free) price of entry alone.