Blogging in Academia
Once again, I must thank
Diamond Geezer for the theme of yet another post. His
London Geezer blog has just featured in a paper entitled
London Blogging: Weblog Culture and Urban Lives given at the
Literary London Conference.
Ph.D-to-be
Blogwell wrote the paper and identified 5 types of blog:
1. Life-documentation
2. Commentary (on environment, news, media, internet, etc)
3. Catharsis (or the purging of negative feelings)
4. Thinking by writing (using a weblog as a thinking tool)
5. Construction of community (many weblogs allow the sharing of help, support, and friendship from known and unknown readers)
Like DG's, mine's a 4, sublimating a 1 with a 2. This could change as life goes on or if there were fellow bloggers in Jakarta to add 5.
I often get the feeling that it's only me and the
Jakarta Post who are prepared to comment publicly on life in the big shitty. Unfortunately, their City News about the quality of life, or lack of it, is in the print version and their online stories generally focus on national news. I'd be very happy to welcome contributors to these pages or to set up a Jakarta specific site which wasn't geared to bars or broads.
Given that
Blogger.com was only launched in 1999 and now hosts nigh on 1 million blogs, although many are inactive having been set up on a whim rather than in tent, the growth of this most democratic medium has been unprecedented. Serious newspapers such as
Guardian, which gives
a link to my humble effort, soon recognized that the reality and truth afforded by access to hyperspace would prevail over political and capitalist prevarications and obscurantism.
And the only folk making a living out of all this are the academics who are given fees for presenting papers couched in pseudo-socio psycho babble to other academics who get paid to listen. Am I being unfair? Try and get your head around this
Genre Analysis of Weblogs.
To be fair, the authors, all four of them, are American. But why are they so analytical in their blogs? The author of
Language Log argues obscurely for a
Shitload of Brevity. At great length.
Ho hum.
|
