Five Years Post-Tribble
by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Modern Language Association
July 08, 2010 – 01:55
My “five years ago today” feature reminds me that the aforementioned time has spanned since the uproar over Ivan Tribble’s infamous screed hit the Chron (now available at a new URL). There are certainly many more academic bloggers than there were in 2005, and there are even some whose blogs are taken seriously as the key venues in which they’re publishing their work. But I’m curious about the degree to which attitudes about blogs have changed — both whether they have, and why. Is it only the rise of social networking systems that privilege immediacy (c.f. Facebook, Twitter) that have lent the relative leisureliness of blogs a kind of seriousness? Is it that we’re using blogs differently, now that we’ve got other outlets for the top-of-the-head thoughts that used to land in venues like this one?
Comments
lack of sources on blogging
by Elizabeth Wolfson — Mehmet Akif Ersoy University, Fulbright U.S. Student Program
July 12, 2010 – 10:44
I just completed my master’s thesis, which examined the role of photoblogs in evolving the social meaning of vernacular photography in the digital era. In researching my topic, I was shocked by the paucity of good scholarly work on blogs. Why all disciplines, from anthropology to American Studies (my home field) to literature and everything in between, are not seriously and rigorously engaging with the practice of blogging and the documents it produces, is beyond me. It is evident to me that blogs evolve our understanding of autobiography, visual culture, social psychology, and many other aspects of everyday life in important ways. Perhaps the problem is that there is engagement within disciplines with blogging, but it is difficult to stay on top of developments across myriad disciplines, if you are not familiar with or located within those discplines. In any event, I would like to see more anthologies and special journal issues dedicated to blogging. While sites such as this are certainly useful for stimulating thought and conversation, and deciminating news and new developments in the field, I think more anthologies and monographs devoted to developing the history and theory of blogging would be useful to establishing blogs as a legitimate object of study.