ࡱ> egd@ \bjbjFF *p,,S*>>>R ,R#.(VVlllll$5!R#>ll>>ll>l>l`>>.l" @ *v,0#&O$4O$.RR>>>>O$>.HlRfTlllRR RR Comments in the Margins Life Narrative, Publishing, Credibility, and Blogs The title for this paper comes from my personal response to blogs. When I first started reading them they reminded me of the scrawls in the margins of the books in the University Library. Comments on thoughts, life, history, and the human condition that applied to a central text, from voices other than that of the author. This is what blogs have been doing for texts on the web. The commentary has grown, however, and the number of voices has increased. The central text has grown to life itself, and many of the voices from the margins are speaking about the personal worlds they live in. This is not how life is presented in any other media. Reality TV? It is an oxymoron, how many of you sit around putting bugs in a blender and then drink them in a time trial? (Last comment credit goes to a radio interview with Jerry Seinfeld). -- 12 am, March 21, 2005 -- We live in a society that is saturated with controlled autobiography. Blogs are unique published life narratives in that they accommodate the movement of genuine un-restricted texts straight from writer to reader. Individuals and online communities are trying to challenge some of societys norms; amongst others, disenfranchised and marginal voices are publishing and forming communities. These texts challenge the traditional frameworks of who speaks for whom, and with what consequences. These new global modes form the frontier of writing in the 21st century. Autobiography and life-narrative have useful tools to explore and discuss these new modes of writing. Blogs can extend the field of life narrative, while at the same time life narrative has tools to offer the blog communities. Theory and community bring the fragments of online narrative together into a unique whole that sheds light on our lives and our experiences of the world we live in. In his influential book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan discusses technology and new media: They are put out long before they are thought out. In fact, their being put outside us tends to cancel the possibility of their being thought out at all (59). New media challenge existing genres, while changing their physical forms. In his Introduction to The Best American Essays, 1987, Gay Talese discusses the effect of the tape recorder on journalism. With the advent of the tape recorder, the essay transmogrified from a format for intellectual challenge and experimentation to a piece hastily thrown together as journalists were able to put together pieces based on direct quotes for a fraction of the money and time: But what they are gettingis not the insight that comes from deep probing and perceptive analysis and old fashioned legwork, it is rather a first draft-drift of my mind, a once-over dialogue thattoo frequently reduces the once-artful craft of magazine writing to the level of talk radio on paper. (xii) This first draft-drift spontaneous style of writing is endemic when dealing with text and technology. Emotions and thoughts are committed rapidly to text, bypassing the careful consideration and editing that characterise the traditional print publishing mediums. If you have access to a computer, are connected to the Internet, can read and type, then you can publish. This instantaneous public text bypasses the traditional print publishing system, where: Stories are social practices that are regulated by the institutions and related social hierarchies, first, because stories do not circulate directly from storytellers to readers. They reach a wide audience only with the assistance of publishers, educators, and various news media, as well as academic and research institutions that legitimise certain stories as valid knowledge. (Stone-Mediatore 132) Due to the economic and political nature of the validating and publishing process, members of powerful social groupings have a much greater chance of being published in print than the marginalised voice. In contrast, publishing online means the content goes straight from the writer to the reader. Texts are not pre-formed by filtering through an institution or process. The agenda is not defined by a commercial venture or an imposed system; individuals write and publish their own voices for their own reasons. To some extent, bloggers validate each others writing by creating communities. They link to each others content, and commiserate or comment. The individual decides who says what, and how they say it. The community either validates or dismisses the individuals comments as representative of the entire group. The communal nature of the blog, and the patterns that can emerge when they are viewed systematically, point to underlying truths in the human condition at a specific time. Since blogs and home pages are snippets of time, the longer journey is not the focus of the text. This fragmented incident-by-incident approach, rather than a holistic one, means that archetypes are not required. There is no tangible plot-line, but rather segments of stories that often do not have an ending. Sometimes there is closure, but no happily ever after. The story develops on a day-to-day basis. This ties in with Smith and Watsons discussion of cohesion in Reading Autobiography: Readers often conceive of autobiographical narrators as telling unified stories of their lives, as creating or discovering coherent selves. But both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity. For there is no coherent self that predates stories about identity, about who one is. Nor is there a unified, stable immutable self that can remember everything that has happened in the past. We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences. Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act. (47) Performative acts are exactly what blogs facilitate. Ideas are vetted, emotions laid out for public view, philosophies explored. The audience/community, rather than reading the entire story in one compact packet, receives the updates day-by-day, or month-by-month. A new style of reading is required, because there are no conclusions in the traditional sense. Blogs present a series of snippets that can sometimes be drawn together into a larger view, but not always. Life is full of loose ends, and blogs have the capacity to remind us that individuals exist in the midst of larger events. The free will and actions of an individual lead into the idea of agency in personal narrative: Both a doing and thing done, personal narrative is a performative struggle for agency within the forces of discourse that shape language, experience, and identitys body: who speaks for whom under what conditions and with what consequencesA celebratory view of personal narrative emphasizes its hopeful project: its human agency and potential for self-transformation and social change through retelling a story; its immediacy, emotionality, and embeddedness in concrete experience; its eschewing of expertsA suspicious view, however, raises concerns over personal narratives confessions and self-indulgences; its false consolationsPersonal narrative may over-personalize experience by disconnecting the personal from the political or reducing the political to the personal. (Langellier 770-701) The blogosphere is a self-policing textual world where all aspects of personal narrative are explored individually and within communities. It is where individuals who want their voices heard by society are congregating. Rebellious texts and reforming texts are being generated by communities at their desks at home and at work. Here is an enclave of real autobiographical writers. They can serve as touchstones in a world where most representation is formed by hierarchical organisations rather than the individual. To my knowledge, a study of the honesty of narration in blogs has not been undertaken. However, it seems that there are enough spaces on the Internet that some are used for completely fictitious persona; others are used for honest self-reflection. In an article about online diaries, That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments, Andreas Kitzmann notes: Online self-documentation, and indeed most autobiographical representation, assumes that human actions and thoughts are actually being represented rather than created or simulated.this assumption differs significantly from those forms of online representation occurring in Moos and virtual communities. In such environments, individuals deliberately fabricate alternative versions of themselvesUnlike those representations emerging from communities of online diarists, simulation is assumed and expected (60-61). Kitzmann states that simulation is neither assumed nor expected with online diaries. Certainly when reading personal blogs, it can be difficult not to believe heartfelt writing. This is not to deny that there are spaces on the web where everyone is a pretender. This is half the fun; blogging, however, seems different. Blogs encourage spontaneous emotional outpourings, and becomes spaces for capturing daily life. The convenience of publishing instantly from ones desk and connecting with a community at any time of day or night encourages venting. This spontaneous outpouring has parallels with the oral tradition. In Oral Poetry, Its Nature Significance and Social Content, Ruth Finnegan muses: The view of poetry as originally and ideally an instinctive, artless outburst of feeling, involves not just a theory about origins, but a romanticising glorification of the natural, the primitive and the emotional, and a reaching out to a supposed lost world in the past when man and his emotional expressions were free, integrated and natural. (33) To some extent, writing on the web can be viewed through romantic/primitive goggles (or googles). The Internet is an anonymous space for dreams and reminiscing, without risk, like a masquerade. The writer can be whomever they want, and can say whatever they wish. It is now a given, especially in many of the web environments, that the narrator is unreliable. As the web splits into different methods of communication, however, the veracity of the narrator seems to shift as well. Bloggers personal entries leave individuals open to attack via the feedback and commenting systems accessible to readers. When attacks occur in blogs, the self-defined community leaps to the defence. The following blog snippet comes from a community of infertility bloggers; Chez Miscarriage is responding to a comment made in Julias blog in which Julia publicly mourns her eighth miscarriage. You don't like infertility blogs? Then don't read them. []You find yourself shocked and appalled to discover the writings of a group of women who express sentiments and ideas with which you emphatically disagree? Then don't bookmark our sites. And please don't tell me that "putting it out there" means that we open ourselves to criticism. [] "Putting it out there" in no way means that we deserve to become the targets of malice, deliberate cruelty, petty spite, or wholesale untruths. Note how the writer abhors untruths. The more blogs I read, the more I ponder how brave many of the writers are. To put ones innermost thoughts and fears out into a public forum where anyone can (and does) respond is a gesture of authenticity in a world full of unreliable narrators. This paper proposes that because blogs are not controlled by any organisation, because the writer is talking straight to the reader, this is one of the spaces where a real other can be heard. In a society where individuals are constantly looking to one another for validation, blogs may enhance the possibility of connection with genuine voices. The blogosphere is instantaneous and fleeting. It echoes a cubist painting, where a single entity is constituted of hundreds of visible planes. It would be virtually impossible for an individual to craft the complexity of the overall vision created by so many voices speaking at once. This is embodied in the blogs surrounding the War in Iraq. Perhaps because the blog is a form of diary, the reader expects a biased view. Diaries are personal, not impartial. Diaries contain a human voice displaying emotion. Since the start of the war in Iraq many people have turned to blogs to try to find out what is really going on. The opportunity now exists to bypass the mainstream print media, and hear human voices speaking from the rubble. Blogs form a valuable extension of Independent (Indie) Media. War blog is a term that has, partially thanks to Salam Pax, entered the common vernacular. Critics of personal narrative dislike reducing the political to the personal. However, when a war is occurring thousands of miles away, the addition of personal voices to the babble of the state-run media adds dimension to the picture of what is actually going on. When you read a soldiers diary during a war, you are presented with a very different view from that you get if you see George Bush and John Howard discussing it from a podium. Blogs add interesting facets to the theoretical discussion of, who speaks to whom, under what conditions and with what consequences. Since writing on the web is freely accessible, traditional writing has been threatened by the glut of content. It has become clear that the book, like the film, is here to stay. The new technologies do not signal the end of the book. The very style that we use to read online is fundamentally different from how we ingest a good story in a book. Umberto Eco notes in his Afterwards in Geoffrey Nunbergs The Future of the Book: We may conceive of hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. Every user can add something, and you can implement a sort of jazzlike unending story. At this point the classical notion of authorship certainly disappears, and we have a new way to implement free creativityHowever there is difference between implementing the activity of producing texts and discussing the existence of produced texts. This is what happens in our present culture, in which we evaluate differently a recorded performance of Beethovens Fifth and a new instance of New Orleans Jam session. (303) Bloggers have been in free-form creation (and we wouldnt have it any other way) for a few years now. The next step is discussion and evaluation. Forming structures for the discussion of blogs is important because online writing is often dismissed as lacking in quality and credibility. Stephen Hill warns: To follow the trajectory that is inscribed in the cultural grammar of the technology text, library systems are likely to become increasingly dependent on machine-ordered information. Quantity of information is likely to be handled effectively, but quality is likely to be reduced to that which can be ordered systematically. Use of libraries is likely to depend on privatized work stations where interrogative relationship between user and system is possible, where serendipitous, un-systematized lateral connection between sources is unlikely, and where reliance on the wisdom of people who know what matters in the application of knowledge is increasingly excluded. (248) This view does not take into account the potential of blogs and the exoskeleton of communal networks that link to web content. There is also an underlying assumption that only selected people know what matters. The critics who focus on quality control issues of the web have not considered carefully the potential of cross-linking and BackTracking in blogs. Blog communities offer a chance to see the underlying patterns and structures that work across these groups of individuals. For example, many of the infertility blogs discuss how the women feel diseased or abnormal. This view is sufficiently prevalent to point to its forming a part of the overarching view within that community. Refining subjective world-views will allow for deeper analysis of the place of the individual within not just culture, but also within each persons specific type of community. When the subjective community is defined, there is a chance to offer writing theory and tools that are directly relevant to each particular sphere. The blog communities are there, relevant life narrative theory exists; the next challenge is bringing these elements together. As Rebecca Blood notes in her Keynote Speech to BlogTalk 2004, it is only too easy not to look beyond familiar and comfortable circles in the blogosphere: When people can choose their news and information from an unlimited variety of sources, they usually will choose sources that confirm their pre-existing biases. According to theFolklorist.com, confirmation bias is 'a tendency on the part of human beings to seek support or confirmation for their beliefs.' It makes sense, if you think about it. The only basis we have in evaluating any source of information is the set of information--including opinions--that we have already decided is true. Very few people will be inclined to choose primary sources of information that consistently put forth ideas that just seem wrong.  Creating archives and systems of study and classification might encourage practiced bloggers to keep expanding and exploring circles and communities. As Terry Kuny, XIST/Consultant, National Library of Canada explains: As we move into the electronic era of digital objects it is important to know that there are new barbarians at the gate and that we are moving into an era where much of what we know today, much of what is coded and written electronically, will be lost forever. We are, to my mind, living in the midst of digital Dark Ages; consequently, much as monks of times past, it falls to librarians and archivists to hold to the tradition which reveres history and the published heritage of our times. Blogs are a celebration of no quality control, of empowering the everyday narrative voice. At the same time, it seems short-sighted for there to be no structure to explore and try to render the medium intelligible. When compared to searching for specific types of blogs, searching for documents on the web is like entering a well-sorted library. As bloggers publish online for a multitude of reasons, there is a possible role for a new kind of critic. The critic discerns the underlying subjective patterns and has a hand in categorisation, key words, defining the nuances of narrative in the medium. The critic sees the underlying patterns and draws them to the surface. Blogs are diaries: the writers (apparent) honesty and fearlessness are an intrinsic part of the value of this type of narrative. Negative critical works would not add to this field. As writers and readers, it is time we move the debate and start utilising the technology. There is a possibility to shape the future, but it will take a shift in the way we view writing and the web. Currently the advent of the blog offers exciting potential for the field of autobiography. The close fit of the content currently created and the medium suggests that utilising new tools like wikkis and BackTracking would be the logical choice for inroads into online literary theory. Life narrative theorists and bloggers have a unique opportunity to explore and create links, collect thoughts and experiences, and form comprehensible hypertext archives exploring the myriad experiences of life in the 21st century. Works Cited Blood, Rebecca, Keynote Speech to BlogTalk 2004 Conference, (online), 2004, Available: < HYPERLINK "http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.html" http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.html>. Eco, Umberto. Afterwards, The Future of the Book, Geoffrey Nunberg. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Poetry: Its Nature Significance and Social Context. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Hill, Stephen. The Tragedy of Technology. London: Pluto Press, 1988. Infertile Me, 12w 6d and Counting, (online), September 7, 2004, Available: < HYPERLINK "http://infertileme.typepad.com/infertile/2004/09/12w_6d_and_coun.html" http://infertileme.typepad.com/infertile/2004/09/12w_6d_and_coun.html> Kitzmann, Andreas. That Different Place: Documenting the Self Within Online Environments, ed. by John Zuern, Biography, an Interdisciplinary quarterly, Online Lives Issue, 26. 1 (2003): 48-65. Kuny, Terry. "The Digital Dark Ages? Challenges in the Preservation of Electronic Information." International Preservation News, No. 17, May 1998. Langellier, Kristin M. Personal Narrative. Encylopedia of Life Writing: autobiographical and biographical forms, Ed. Margaretta Jolly. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, II, (2001): 700-701. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Melbourne: Sphere Books, 1967. Smith, Sidonie and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2001. Stone-Mediatore, Shari, Reading Across Borders, Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Talese, Gay. Introduction. Ed. Gay Talese. The Best American Essays 1987. New York: Ticknor& Fields, 1987.    < HYPERLINK "http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.html" http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.html>. NO `a{sfg !!!!!!!!!"%%'6'u((++1,h6`5OJQJ h6`>*h)GOJQJh6`h6`6OJQJh6`0JOJQJh6`>*OJQJh)@OJQJh6`H*OJQJ hZjmh)@CJOJQJ^JaJ hZjmh6`CJOJQJ^JaJh)@CJOJQJh6`OJQJ3NO {qr<~!3"S%Y'(*-.0^`^ m]m^gd)@[\1,^,J---112232C2R2k2V4W4[4445567.8/89<9g9999:3:::;;;;===+>,>B>A$A4A8AAAAvB~BBBB𙊙h6`6OJPJQJmH sH h6`OJPJQJmH sH h/,&OJQJh6`>*OJQJheOJQJhehUOJQJjh6`Uh6`jh6`0JOJQJU h6`6 h6`>*h6`OJQJh"OJQJ60k2[46/8<D>@AfDEHxIKLNRTTTTTU 0d^`0$a$^^ ^`gd"`BBCCCCDDeDfD;EExIKKKKLNOPQQcQQQRRTTTCUDUUUUUUUUȮxhbx h6`0Jjh6`B*Uphh6`B*phjh6`B*Uphh6`H*OJQJhkQOJQJhMmOJQJh6`OJQJh6`jhZjm0JOJQJUh6`OJQJh6`B*OJQJphh.OJPJQJmH sH h6`OJPJQJmH sH h6`6OJPJQJmH sH &UUUUUDV{VVVVVW;W*B*phh6`B*ph h6`0JjEh6`Ujh6`U h6`6 h6`>*h6`hkQ7U4VVVWX]YZtZ [[[[[[[[[[0\\\\\d 0d^`0\\\\\\\\\\\\\ܻh6`5OJQJhZjmhZjmmH sH  hZjm0JjhZjmB*UphhZjmB*phjhZjmB*UphhZjmjhZjm0JU (/ =!"#$% EDyK 4http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.htmlyK hhttp://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.htmlDyK Fhttp://infertileme.typepad.com/infertile/2004/09/12w_6d_and_coun.htmlyK http://infertileme.typepad.com/infertile/2004/09/12w_6d_and_coun.htmlEDyK 4http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.htmlyK hhttp://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.htmlH@H Normal CJOJPJQJ_HmH sH tH 8@8 Heading 1$@&5V@V Heading 2$<@&56CJOJQJtH uDA@D Default Paragraph FontVi@V  Table Normal :V 44 la (k(No List :@:  Footnote TextCJ@&@@ Footnote ReferenceH*0U@0 Hyperlink>*B*LC@"L Body Text Indent ^OJQJ`R@2` Body Text Indent 2 ^B*PJmH phsH uJB@BJ Body Text6B*OJQJphtH uDP@RD Body Text 2B*OJQJphTS@bT Body Text Indent 3 ^ CJOJQJ2*V,CT2T pNO{q r <~3SY "%&(k*[,./04D689f<=@xACDFJLLLLLM4NNNOP]QRtR SSSSSSSSSS0TTTU000x0x00000000000000x00x000 000000(00(00000800800@0000000000H00000000000000000x@08@0@0x0 f (k*[,./04U\>00 ,V\>00\>00]F 0Pw x\>00^>00 }1,BU\\/24570U\036\1CMMM;OOOTXXX*]+5 ^+5v _+5 `+5,B a+5B b+5c+5Dd+5 e+5|f+5g+5lh+5 i+5 j+5 k+5d l+5\ m+5 n+5 o+5 p+5tq+5 r+5\ s+5t+5 u+5Tv+5w+5d] x+5] y+5z z+5{ {+5~ |+5 }+5 ~+5IJ+5<+5 +5 +54 +5D +5 +5 +5 x { { )0)0NNNNN}N}NNNNNNNNNOOOQQRRPRPRURURRRRRRS#S#SfSfSSSU     ! "#$%&'() -0-0 N NN&N&NNNNNNNNNNN-OPPQQ'R'RTRTR^R^RRRRRR!S*S*SnSnSSSU  ! "#$%&'() :)*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsStreet urn:schemas:contactsSn'urn:schemas:contacts GivenName;**urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsaddress9*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsState=#*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags PlaceType="*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags PlaceName8*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsdateV(*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsplacehttp://www.5iantlavalamp.com/8%*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagsCityB'*urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttagscountry-region 200479DayMonthYear*)('(%(#"(%("#((%*)(%(%((%(%(#"((%(($ * >H ""##T'['(())11)2.2"6+66688== AA=DEDDDHHKKKKLL MMMNOOBPGPPP]QgQQQQQRR{RRSSLSVSpSxSSSSSSSS2T~TUO  ""?CCCCCLMMNNNNOOOPPPPPPQQtRR+S1SSSSSSSSTU333333333333333333IJQQURtRSUCCCMMMM;OOSTT.T/T2T3T}T~TTTTTU]F |g ^`OJQJo(^`.pp^p`.@ @ ^@ `.^`.^`.^`.^`.PP^P`.]F  @JvSlJUPg  Ue/,&,))@)G6`ZjmMmkQ."ISSTUQ@ T@UnknownGz Times New Roman5Symbol3& z Arial?5 z Courier New3z Times;& z Helvetica[uC Lucida GrandeCourier NewO1 CourierCourier New qhss uG* uG*4dSSd 2qH?)@@Comments in the Margins - When Literary Theory and Blogs Combine k Cavanaghadam3 Oh+'00 @L h t AComments in the Margins - When Literary Theory and Blogs Combineromm k Cavanagh  Ca Ca Normal.dot adam3.d2amMicrosoft Word 10.0@^в@f@@f@ uG՜.+,D՜.+,Px  1///*S: AComments in the Margins - When Literary Theory and Blogs Combine Titlep(V^j_PID_LINKBASE _PID_HLINKSAA-^Fhttp://infertileme.typepad.com/infertile/2004/09/12w_6d_and_coun.htmlVe4http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.htmlVe4http://www.rebeccablood.net/talks/waging_peace.html  !"#$%&'()*+,-./012345678:;<=>?@BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSUVWXYZ[]^_`abcfRoot Entry F9@hData 91TableA_$WordDocument*pSummaryInformation(TDocumentSummaryInformation8\CompObjj  FMicrosoft Word Document MSWordDocWord.Document.89q