Conclusion: Keep On A-Keepin' On, But In a New Way

Emily Strides Forth Into a Brave New World...

Questions to Consider:

Can place-blogging make more visible the material conditions of writing Wysocki ascribes to her definition of new media? 

Does the nature of blogging sufficiently surface the role of technology in composition for those who use it? Can students adequately "consider the experiential and epistemological consequences of their new tools" through the act of blogging, or does the blog format/technology work to disguise those consequences? (Does blogging function for students too much as a means of publishing a final product, rather than as a visible means of constructing discourse?)

Is there a natural division between online places/communities and physical places/communities, or is it culturally constructed? Are the skills for "good citizenship" and place-connection learned online transferable to non-online communities?


Might place-blogging be important for OU students in particular, as a means of connecting to the Athens area?

Weblog of a Place (2)

This is the view from my blog. It looks a whole lot like the view from my backyard.

Weblog of Place (1)

"After writing on this weblog for almost three years, I could say it has become a place. Not only a metaphorical or virtual place, but a real physical place. I feel like this weblog is an extra room in my house--the one with the funky pink wallpaper." (Fezoca, The Chatterbox)

"The combination of the graphic design elements of the web and the prominence weblogs give to the individual writer's voice enables a strong sense of place." (Numenius, Feathers of Hope)

Teaching the Tensions

"Because a place blog is not itself a substitute for the place it represents, its job is not to keep people there; it is only rhetorically successful if it convinces readers to leave it. Place bloggers hope you will return, but only after engaging with places first hand...place blogging can sometimes create a conflict between the time one spends in front of the computer writing and the time one spends exploring actual places."

"This is the dilemma all place bloggers struggle with, but it can be a productive tension if it serves to make the technology more visible to those who use it."

Technologies of Seeing (2)

At one time there were people who thought my grandfather was a technological wizard.

You see, Pap could never make the claim that he'd lived always a stone's throw from where he'd been born, because a war got in the way. During his time abroad, he donated one arm and one eye to the fertility of a German field. Thus barred from making a substantial living as a farmer or coal miner, he became upon his return a self-taught expert in the field of television repair. The one-man business he built raised three children and kept the populations of two counties in prime time, a service that I sometimes think made him a local legend. (When I was teaching at Belmont Tech, I occasionally heard to the effect: "You're Bill Gallagher's granddaughter? The man with one arm? Lord, he used to come fix our TV when I was little!) I can still remember his look the first time he had to ask my brother for help with the TV...the first time that prized knowledge, that had made him a savior to so many, had truly proved obsolete.

He also invented things. He built a mechanized fishing pole he could operate with one hand. Less mechanically, he built a banjo pick to strap to the stump of his arm, so he wouldn't have to give up music. Pap plays the banjo better with one arm than most do with two. If you were to wander into his house some winter's day, you might hear him playing one of my favorites "Cold Frosty Morning," picking in the Scotch-Irish style. It would sound something like this (if this particular player were playing one-armed):

When I think of technology I think of my grandfather, and when I think of home I think of him, who knows every inch of those hills, every plant, animal, and tree--I unite these ideas in one man, yet I have never once thought of "technology" and "home" together without him as mediator. Sometimes I think he is my lens. 

Technologies of Seeing (1)

Front:  Lenses for Writing
"By writing I learned to think about place, which in turn made me SEE it. And the cycle continues...looking makes me listen, makes me alive to the infinite transformations around me that make a place THIS place." (Pica, Feathers of Hope)

"What cannot be conveniently georeferenced and placed in a computer map gets forgotten about...if every place has tales, trying to write them down is a worthy way to bring them to the light." (Numenius, Feathers of Hope)

"The internet also seems to be part of the problem: As the 'information superhighway,' it tends to provide us with vast amounts of information in a very short time. However, Numenius expresses some hope that we are 'not very far off from having narrative-rich geographies emerge from the grassroots side of the web,' suggesting the future collaboration between weblogs and other locative media."

"Drawing on this wide range of technologies, blogging about place has the potential to be a deeply multimodal form of composition, reflecting both the radical changes taking place in communication technologies and the complex and diverse ways we come to develop our connections to place."


Back: Heuristics for Awareness
"The reverse chronological order and expectation of frequent updates invites dailyness by encouraging bloggers to notice the everyday changes in the world around them."--benefits of form

"This online rhetorical neighborhood supports the work of geographically dispersed writers in their ongoing efforts to understand their actual neighborhoods...the inspiration derived from good writing and insight into how others construct their sense of place...foster the conditions for further invention, as place bloggers learn from each other."

Geographies of Audience (2)

I'm amazed at how few of us know the story of how Guernsey County got its name, and just as amazed that those who do know the story aren't fascinated by it.

A group of settlers came to America from the Island of Guernsey. They roamed around the Eastern seaboard for a few years, never content to stay in the places they found. They made their way across Pennsylvania--no mean feat, when one travels with oxen and wagons--and found themselves in southeastern Ohio, meaning to push on for the plains near the "English lakes", where they'd heard land was prosperous for farming. But the women...well, the women fell in love. They looked at our hills and our trees and said to themselves, "Could anyplace be as beautiful as this? As fruitful? No, we know it couldn't." And they told the men they could go on, but it would be without their wives and children. They would stay here, to raise crops and kids. I suppose even if any of the men thought a lake was better than a cabin with a warm hearth under the chestnut trees, they saw the light quickly enough. And Guernsey County took its name from these settlers. (Though I prefer to think of it as taking its name from these women, who had the real rhetorical power.)

Our county was born from powerful women and appreciation of beauty. How could such a birthright ever be forgotten?

Geographies of Audience (1)

1) Audience and Purpose

• To write about a place but not necessarily for an audience in that place; to explain the place for people in other places
• To write both about a place and for an audience in that place (civic participation, activism)

2) The Edge Effect: Creating a Community Online

"The importance of reading other peoples' blogs is not as an escape from the limits of ones own geographic situatedness, but as a means of engaging more fully with ones own place...insight into other ways to engage a place--heuristics and ways of thinking one can bring back to ones own blog."

"We cannot fully understand our local environments unless we understand how they are connected to global forces always acting on it, often without us knowing....If the internet as a technology has driven globalization in many ways, it might also be a medium that enables individuals to better understand the affects of global forces on any local situation."

3) Lure of the Local

Blogging can "create local knowledge that might be contributed to the ongoing historical identity of the places...success for a local blog is measured by its ability to foster deeper local involvement over time."

The Exigencies of Place (2)

Rootedness

I wasn't born at home like my mother's cousins, so I can't say like some of them can that I've lived all my life within a stone's throw of where I was born. (In case you can't tell, being able to say that is a matter of pride. Will we one day look at these home-rooted people with the admiration the Victorians held for explorers?) I was born 30 miles away, in a hospital that isn't there anymore. My family's farm is still there though, like it has been for the 150 years my family has lived there, one generation rolling into place after the next, while the previous rolls into the graveyard about a mile down the road, with no fuss and no fluster. This is how it is.

We hold the land and the land holds us.

The Exigencies of Place (1)

In a mediated communication environment in which the boundaries between public selves and private selves are being disrupted, "the blog  might be understood as a particular reaction to the constant flux of subjectivity, as a generic effort of reflexivity within the subject that creates an eddy of relative stability. Infinite play, constant innovation, is not psychically sustainable on an infinite basis" (Millard and Shepherd). The social function of blogging is, at least in part, about the ongoing construction of self in response to changing social and cultural conditions."

Mobility
"I claim this place with my words. I am making claims now, tiny claims of nativity." Wendy, Other Wind


Rootedness
"To speak of place as an entity with which one can have a relationship is in itself a way of constructing identity. Place, in this view, is no longer the backdrop for human activities but something that impinges on ones life, that actively shapes and constrains the self." The relationship "requires daily nurture."

Technology
"Place bloggers are taking seriously the mediating role of online technologies and other new media in how we experience places."

Politics
"The construction of a place-based sense of identity is ethically and politically necessary to begin addressing" issues from local politics to the environmental crisis.

Writing as Orientation
"Guideposts are only there when we construct them, are only useful if others know how to read them, and will only be used if they point toward destinations students are attracted to." Charles Bazerman

"Place blogging assumes a common rhetorical exigency, namely that a sense of place is not just inherited but is actively constructed through rhetorical action."

Site-Specific Installations
We can be "not individuals who use technology but selves connected to particular communities and places. To this end, place blogging has the potential to reinforce pedagogical values shared by scholars and teachers who normally might not identify with "Computers and Writing" or new media approaches to composition...emphasizing the links between self and place is the goal of creating both online rhetorical places (place blogs) and educational places (classrooms) as locations where students" can make meanings.

Remediated Genres (2)

I was teaching as an adjunct at a southeast Ohio community college when an email came around from the department heads, explaining that the English faculty was to work on "eradicating" our students' dialect. We would start with one "outlawed" dialectical feature per week--we would announce the banned words to our classes, then punish any student who used them in speech or writing. (The method of punishment was left up to us.) The first phrase on the chopping block: We was.

I'll tell you what we was. We was screwed.

I've often thought that I should write down a sort of Appalachian dictionary. Not just for local words--did anyone carry their books to class in a poke today? The answer may surprise you--but also for phrases, constructions, and their deeply rooted origins. Maybe if I managed to make sound academic enough, our teachers would stop treating us like idiots for speaking it. Maybe we'd stop believing it of ourselves.

Pap always said we lived on Hisgee Road. When I was little, he nicknamed me Matildee. He took me fishing in a crick. It wasn't until I was older that I realized we lived on Hisgah Road, that he should have been calling me Matlida, and that all this time we'd been fishing in a creek.

My nephew is 10. I asked him recently if he wanted to walk down to the crick. "It's a creek," he told me in the way that children sometimes do when they feel like they've just one-upped an adult. "Well, it's spelled that way," I replied. "But you can pronounce it the other way, too. It's the Scotch-Irish pronunciation. That's what part of our family was. And that's how a lot of people around here talk sometime. It's not wrong, it's just different." He waited for me to finish speaking before he delivered the coup de grace. "My teacher said it's wrong."

I've worried about that a lot--I'm a language-person, so I would worry about that.  How will Dale feel if he grows up believing the way he was taught to speak is wrong?

Remediated Genres (1)

...or, Blogging Has Ancestry

The place blogs localized adaptations of the blog "genre," mixing traits from previous forms of writing.

1) Journals, Logs, and Field Notebooks (aka, What Would Thoreau blog?)
The place bloggers showed "close attention to place and daily cultivation ... of mind(s) trying to figure out (their) relationship with place."
  One blogger explains the difference between a log book and blog as focusing on audience and geography:
"While anyone is able and welcome to read our logbooks, nobody ever does, because they are physically bound, literally and figuratively, in our living room. . . the weblog is a place where I can write something and know that at least fifteen, and probably many more, people will read it" (Feathers of Hope).

2) Personal Essays
"Each post reads like a short essay representing the mind at work...weav(ing) together photographs, personal experience, descriptions of places...and philosophical reflections on life and place, taking what seems at first like disparate elements and weaving them together into a meaningful whole...a way to experiment with notions of both self and place."

3)Ethnography and Journalism
Blogs serve as "a growing archive of local knowledge...important for responsible civic engagement in the community."

4) Travel Writing
Blogs allow authors to "step outside of routine and perceive a place with new eyes, to see what appears to be natural or inevitable as something constructed...a way of engaging with relatively ordinary places, the kinds of places we inhabit rather than visit, the places that do less work to help us see what's there."

Defining Blogging, Defining Place (2)

Definition 1:  Appalachian peoples have traditionally prized self-reliance and independence. Several years ago, there came a great snowfall in Western Appalachia. The Red Cross came to help people who might be stranded without food or fuel. Two workers heard about an old woman living alone far back into the hills, and they went to see about her. After an arduous trip, they skidded and slid down into her valley, got out and knocked on the door. When she appeared, one of the men spoke.

“Hello, ma'am, we're from the Red Cross,” he said, but before he could finish, the old woman replied, “Well, I don't think I'm goin' to be able to help you any this year. It's been a hard winter.”

Definition 2: Appalachians have a deep love of place. One of the first questions asked, after “Whose boy/girl are you?” is “Where are you from?” We are oriented around place; we remember our homeplace and many of us go back as often as possible. Even when it is difficult to make a living in our homeplace, we don't like to leave, and we at least visit home whenever we can. Sense of place makes it hard for us to leave the hills, and when we do, we miss them.

There is a joke told about Appalachian peoples. This fellow died and went to heaven. St. Peter showed him around, and he was amazed by the streets of gold, heavenly choirs, and harps. Then he heard these people in the corner of heaven raising an awful fuss, arguing, complaining, and shouting. He also noticed they were chained to a wall. He asked St. Peter, “Who are these people?”

“Oh, those are the Appalachian hill folk,” St. Peter said. The man asked, “Why are they chained to a wall?” St. Peter replied, “Well, we have to do that. If we didn't, they'd go home every weekend.”

Defining Blogging, Defining Place (1)

Lindgren sees the blog as representing multiple genres and adapting to multiple rhetorical needs. The adaptability of the blog is what drew the Ecotone authors, who saw blogging as a sort of experiment in constructing "a sense of self informed by place." Lindgren sees the place bloggers as building with their blogs "a unique discursive space," in which they could safely explore the complexities of online life and life in particular places. 

• "Writing takes place. It takes place socially and rhetorically. To write is to position oneself within genres"

 Anis Bawarshi

"Instead of linking to other places on the net, we are linking to places period." (Chris, Bowen Island Journal)

         Chris goes on to define the "hyperlink" as a device for meaning-making; this is the sort of connection-making that allows for a sense of place identity. In essence, "the ability to make such links presupposes inhabitation, of being in a place in order to be able to write about it."

According to the Ecotone wiki:

"Place bloggers write, on one level, about the place where they live: its ecology, its beauty, the particular quality of nature in that place, and their relation to it. On another level, place bloggers are concerned with larger questions of ecology and land use, the future of the environment, and human beings' relation to (or alienation from) the world we inhabit and share. And on a still deeper level, many place bloggers are exploring the whole notion of 'place' itself: where and what is this elusive idea of place, in its broadest sense, and what does it mean to us as spiritual beings in perpetual search of something called home?"

Introduction(2)

When I meet people from my home county, they ask, "Now, whose girl are you?" If they don't know your family (and they probably do), they ask, "Now, where (in the county/area) are you from?" The subtext being, who your family is and where you are from say something essential about who you are, some definition.

For me, my family and where I'm from are the same thing.

Introduction(1)

Blogging Places: Locating Pedagogy in the Whereness of Weblogs 

by Tim Lindgren
KAIROS 10.1

"In what ways can blogging help foster a deeper sense of place and encourage reflection on the relationship between place and identity?"

Introduction

• Analyzing the Ecotone: Writing About Place Wiki

Defining Blogging, Defining Place
Remediated Genres
The Exigency of Place
Geographies of Audience
Technologies of Seeing
Weblog as Place
Conclusion