jill/txt

I’m going to be gone again for a few days. Back Monday. Seeya!

Remember Daughters of Freya, the email mystery about a Californian sex cult I posted about a few months ago? They’re organising a group read, where people who sign up get the story for half price (so about $4) and all receive emails at the same time and get to discuss what’s happening with other readers. Might be fun. Starts August 1.

Anyone interested in German language electronic literature will be pleased to find Beat Suter’s catalogue of it: “Diese datenbank mit dem korpus deutschsprachiger hyperfictions liefert drei kommentierte listen zum thema hyperfiction.” Beat Suter, who’s based in Zürich, has also published and presented a pile of papers on hypertext fiction, mostly in German, which means I can understand enough to see that I’d love to read them but not enough to really understand them. His site, Cyberfiction.ch, also published new German language hyperfiction.

Danny Butt’s stopped blogging, partly because he finds that blogging encourages him to write too fast, almost as though he’s part of the media he does not trust - “my “private” is thoroughly colonised by the “public””, he writes, and also notes that “because I grew up a smartarse white Australian male,” (he writes) “I am well versed in the art of having important-sounding opinions about things without any real experience or knowledge.”

I do think blogs have a very important role as a tactical media form. They’re very useful in a) building community, b) being a direct information source of views excluded from organised media, or c) an informal view into organisations or structures of power. These are all processes that feed into longer-run, more strategic questions of situated political action of the type I’m trying to foster. But my writing does not provide any of these great bloggy traits. I already fail to make the most of the communities I belong to - I don’t need to meet any more people! And I don’t really represent a collective voice that needs to be heard all the time. And I’m not working within a structure whose internal workings I can break down for those outside it.

Anyway, an interesting post with somewhat different ideas for people thinking about why blogging’s good and why sometimes it mightn’t be.

Blogging seems to be my way of working. I had no desire at all to blog our wonderful trip through Arizona, or the camping (I’ve visited 13 US states in the last few weeks!) or the beach, but today I’m back to trying to think about writing and research and for the first time in weeks I actually wanted to blog.

I read about that nanny who blogged and her employer didn’t like it and fired her and then wrote an embarrassingly personal account of it in the New York Times. Strange, don’t you think, that writing revealing personal accounts of yourself and others in the New York Times is journalism and socially acceptable whereas writing similar things in a blog isn’t. The nanny — who’s starting grad school this autumn (nineteenth century English literature) and who reads Profgrrrl, just like me — has decided to blog pseudonymously henceforth. Reading that I toyed with the idea of making my blog pseudonymous, but you know, it’s really rather late. I mean, I like blogging as myself. I just don’t want to blog my holidays or my love life.

Mind you, they’re both entirely wonderful. Not that I’m blogging them or anything.

I’m going to spend the next week writing a paper for Digital Arts and Culture ‘05 (in Copenhagen this year, deadline is August 8 and they want full papers not just abstracts) and a synopsis for a Norwegian book I’ve been asked to contribute an essay to, on networking and blogs.

Now if I hadn’t just read about that nanny and oh, that column in the Chronicle where the pre-digital professor says they’d never hire someone who had a blog, I might have admitted that actually I’d prefer to prolong my holidays, which were exceptionally pleasant. Instead, I’ll simply nod to Matt’s post about how blogging is networking (that article by Phil Agre is really good for would-be and new academics, by the way) and note that I wouldn’t have been asked to write that article about blogging as a way of networking if I hadn’t been using my blog to network professionally for a while. Quite a few juicy, professional opportunities that wouldn’t have appeared without this blog, really.

Of course I’m preaching to the converted, aren’t I? And I’m more likely to be hiring people than being hired in the next few years. Obviously, as a post-digital academic, I’d be worried about hiring someone who didn’t have a web presence.