Writing Online

Although our reflective analysis assignment is due at the end of the semester, we will write a rough analysis of our activities around the middle of the semester. To analyze our activities–designing websites, maintaining blogs, and writing articles for Wikipedia–in a productive way, we need to interpret our activities through the theoretical lenses of our readings, not only in CyberReader but also in the other texts we come across (like the ones I link to from this blog). We need to keep in mind distinctions between reality and virtual reality, and identities online and offline. We want to consider differences in interactivity and immediacy between print and electronic writing.  And we want to consider similarities in all of these, too.

The University of Michigan Press and Library have a free on-line book titled “The Best of Technology Writing 2006.”

It’s worthwhile to read jill/txt, a blog maintained by Jill Walker, an associate professor at the University of Bergen who researches online story telling. A recent post on an assignment for her students asks them to look at their own blogs individually and as a group using the criteria of

- content
- layout
- writing style
- kinds of accessories (blogrolls, link to facebook profile, comments, etc?).

With these criteria, the students are to determine if their blogs are in the same genre or different ones, and how they match other genres in “art, film, television, or literature.”

Neva Chonin interviews Brad Fitzpatrick, the creator (at the age of 18) of LiveJournal, now a community of 8 million users. Chonin notes the differences between LiveJournalers and bloggers:

There are differences between the worlds of blogs and LJs. LiveJournal’s user base skews young, drawing a large proportion of teenagers, whereas blogging tends to attract users in their late 20s and early 30s. Additionally, LJ is seen as a private space for networking and interpersonal discourse; blogs are viewed as one-person publications directed toward a larger audience. A growing number of people maintain both an LJ and a blog, but the two camps traditionally don’t mix, with some bloggers dismissing Journalers as trivial kids and Journalers mocking bloggers as wannabe Web stars.

Fitzpatrick and the Trotts hope to erase some of those assumptions, especially after Six Apart introduces its Comet platform — expected out next year — which will combine the public platform of blogging, the community interaction of LiveJournal and the networking of sites like my MySpace.com.

In looking at the genres of websites, blogs, and other online environments, we might expect interaction among them (and print) that generates new genres.

Earlier I mentioned Jon Udell’s post on the influence of technology on writing. Now, the Read/WriteWeb is looking at how mainstream media are increasing their use of web 2.0 services. From their table, one can see how major newspapers are using not only RSS feeds but also digg and del.icio.us, and to a lesser extent, newsvine. It will be interesting to see how online and offline genres will continue to interact and influence one another.

In addition to media, it seems that business in generally is embracing web 2.0 technology. In the DMNewsBlog, Giselle Abramovich reports on research showing that companies are adopting social media.

A University of Massachusetts Dartmouth survey found that the fastest growing Inc. 500 companies adopt blogging, podcasting and other social media as business tools and a majority of companies consider social media to play significant strategic role.

The blog “waggish” has posted “Genre: Thoughts on blogs and genres” and concludes:

Blogs are not content-focused, in that the content rolls by too quickly to be lasting. (Yes, they provide content, but when it’s so subject to being missed or disorganized, the structural integrity of the content is not the focus.) But nor are they personality-focused. If Josh Marshall started writing exclusively about Andrei Tarkovsky tomorrow, he would lose much of his audience, who would nonetheless stick with Kevin Drum. Not to say that they’re the same, but they are not unique in the way that novelists are. They can be replaced.

Blogs, then, are topic-focused. (And by topic I effectively mean the definable gestalt of the blog.) Individual content matters less in a blog than sticking to a consistent topic over time. And this is where the analogy to 30s romantic comedy seems apropos; these movies too stuck to a remarkably consistent topic, and the individual variations were practically indistinct. To put it another way, it was up to the individual to distinguish what variations they preferred, because the level of homogeneity was so high. And so it is with any given blog, or even with a blog genre. The difference is that the medium makes it that much more difficult to ever separate out individual works for praise, and so the gestalt is left to stand on its own. In the 30s, people could see one movie and remember it well, whether it was good or bad. In the medium of blogs, that’s not really possible; you absorb an entire gestalt as you consume them.

This produces two diverging effects: either people get lost in the mass of repetitive, homogenous content and process what they happen to run into, or they abstract quite heavily to synthesize large amounts of data into a graspable gestalt. Sort of like reading Balzac.

What do you think?

Note that waggish has two more posts on blogs: Thoughts on genre: Blogs and improvization and Thoughts on genre: Blogs and practice.

Clay Shirky, a well-known author on things internet, in his post “Second Life, Games, and Virtual Worlds,” asks:

will Second Life become a platform for a significant online population? And, second, what can Second Life tell us about the future of virtual worlds generally?

It is the second question that connects to our upcoming readings on virtual reality. Shirky states:

With that said, I don’t believe that “virtual worlds” describes a coherent category, or, put another way, the group of things lumped together as virtual worlds have such variable implementations and user adoption rates that they are not well described as a single conceptual group.

Shirky goes on to note the differences between games and other virtual worlds, asserting that it will be some time before technology can advance enough to make those other worlds as popular as games, to enable them “re-create the full sense of being in someone’s presence in a mediated environment.”

As we blog and create our websites, we should be asking ourselves how the design and environment of our blogs and websites mediate communication and interaction among us and others.

Soon, we’ll be talking about virtual reality. One popular virtual environment is Second Life. David Dewit (Athens News) writes about it, “Virtual-reality software creates parallel campus, enhances education“, and how it’s being used in an upper-division rhetoric and composition course at Ohio University taught by Paul Shovlin:

But [Shovlin's] interest is really in the effects of the environment itself. He said he wanted his students to think critically about the appearance and impressions they were giving off, demonstrating to them that if his avatar looked like Darth Vader, they wouldn’t take him seriously.

“Rhetoric is the art of persuasion,” he said. “A certain appearance in virtual reality can affect ethos and credibility.”

Shovlin said that at the end of his course he wanted students to become critical agents, to take care of themselves in the virtual environment of Second Life and translate that to other environments.

“That’s what I think literacy is,” he said, “adapting and being successful in different environments in terms of our communication.”

“Writing in Cyberspace” has similar interests. As we blog, build websites, and write online, we need to consider how online environments impact our writing as compared to print environments, to think critically about those differences, and transfer and “translate” our writing into new environments.

One issue we’ll look at is that of identity. People often assume pseudo-identities in virtual communities. With respect to dating and business ventures, however, real offline identities are essential. The Read/Write Web has a post “Nobody knows you’re a dog 2.0” on this problem:

On the internet it is easy to pretend to be somebody else. Don’t like your name, adopt a new one. Don’t like the way you look, Photoshop your picture. Think you are too young or too old, select a new age. How is anybody going to find out anyway?

To tackle this problem, Identity Verification Services are arising. The Read/Write Web reviews three of these–Trufina, Opinity, and Idology–and the issues they bring with them, and conclude that “there is still a lot of room for improvement.”

Bodmas writes about how to run a wiki on your own computer (i.e., (x)ubuntu). On using wikis non-collaboratively, he writes:

Wikis were designed to make collaboration easy, so why a private wiki? I use a wiki running on my desktop computer as a notebook for drafting out ideas, and for making rapid revisions to sets of pages. I also use my desktop wiki as a filing cabinet for odd scraps of information as all wiki engines feature a full text search.

Basically, that’s how we are using them in our class: for storing information and ideas and drafting out possible scenarios for our websites. What’s nice about using the wiki is it’s easy to use and you can see previous versions if you wish, thus never losing ideas.