A Response to “Personal Publication and Public Attention.”

Torill Elvira Mortenseen describes the academic critique of blogs in a way that approaches blogs almost exclusively from the perspective of form, and this highlights the pedagogical obstacles we might face when attempting to incorporate blogs into a curriculum, especially in the atmosphere of an English classroom. As literature instructors, we can teach blogs as literary artifacts, but we would be hard pressed to find “canonical” bloggers or weblogs. Academic or college-level anthologies (whether online or [god forbid] in print) of “American Weblogs from 1995-2005” (or courses with the same title) are not quite within our grasp. This is partly because weblogs defy the kind of stability we traditionally desire in the object of our critique (the nationality and time period that we usually assign to our courses or anthologies cannot be applied to blogs) and also partly because blogging smacks of the vanity-press publication that undermines our esteem for anything but the most “time-tested” narratives. In composition or technical writing classrooms, blogging can be regulated to “novelty” status because it doesn’t lend itself to the increasingly career-training emphasis of those classrooms. These kinds of obstacles challenge (for worse AND for better) the traditional objects of study in the writing or literature classroom and further objectify or materialize the focus of the Humanities.

The idea of the literary cannon is, of course, riddled with problems, but it does provide us with a body of examples and, to a certain extent, a cultural body of knowledge that we can share (or that we can pretend to share, or that we can imagine that we used to share). Imagine attempting to teach a 20^th Century Novels class with no established examples of “good” 20^th Century novels. Thus, when performing academic critique on blogs, we are cornered into thinking about what a blog “is”: a problem Elvira-Mortenseen addresses by providing several definitions and arguing for the least definitive of them all. We also project the potentials of blogs, what they might mean in the future for bloggers, readers of blogs, and democratic expression in general. These discussions can certainly improve the learning environments we try to create, but they relegate us to examining form and making predictions about what shapes that form might take. This materializes our examinations of literature to a great deal- instead of discussing arguments or specific expressions that reflect upon the human condition, the writing and literature classroom becomes a place where students and teachers take into account economic and technological elements of presently available information storage/delivery devices and wonder about the information storage/delivery devices to come.