Small Strokes Big Oaks

This continues a series of posts that, all together, comprise my literature review for my Master’s thesis research.  You can view all of the posts by clicking here.

What follows is a brief section that works to define blogging as a genre as it relates to feminism.  Enjoy!

While the radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s networked their writings by referencing each other within the texts, today’s networked writing shows itself in hyperlinked form on the Internet.  The entire premise of social networking websites like Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter is to connect, or network, with other people or articles through various links either shared by the sites themselves, or from person to person.  Personal blogs can also share this networked quality; blogs are a “…hybrid genre of writing in digital spaces.  As a log, they stretch back to the genre of journal and diary writing, but as a web text, they encourage the linking to other networks, both by the blog owner and users of the blog” (Lindquist and Seitz 184).  In order to better find and share information, as well as cultivate a loyal audience, bloggers tend to form communities of people who have the same goals in mind.  Each blogger has his/her own unique style (some might post cartoons, others might post academic responses, some might muse on or share opinions about certain subjects, etc.), but bloggers with the same end goal are likely to combine efforts, collaborate, comment on each other’s stories, and share each other’s information.  Often bloggers will post links to favorite websites in the sidebars next to the individual blog posts, as well as links to other blogs or web pages within the individual posts themselves.  This creates a network, or a kind of community, between bloggers similar to the linked texts of the feminists in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the article, “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog,” Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd set out analyzing blogs in order to discover many things about blogs as a genre, including why blogging caught on so quickly, what the motivations behind bloggers are, what rhetorical work blogs perform and how they perform this work, and how to define blogs as a genre.  In order to answer these questions, Miller and Shepherd analyzed a random selection of personal blogs, well-known blogs, and evaluative criteria within blogging communities.  Miller and Shepherd look at the history of blogs in this article, as well as the history surrounding their emergence.  They discuss MTV’s The Real World and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal and the tension between public and private that emerged there.  At this point in time, the world was trying to make celebrities into real people and real people into celebrities.  They mention that cell-phone ownership and the appearance of memoirs also added to the need for people to share information, and also point out the major tenants of blogs as a genre.  They say, “content is the most important feature of a blog” (1458), and that there is a general expectation that links to other relevant content should also be provided, as well as the format of the most recent post appearing first on a site.  There is also the expectation that blogs are primarily nonfiction: “The blogging subject engages in self-disclosure, and as we noted earlier the blog works to bind together in a recognizable rhetorical form the four functions of self-disclosure: self-clarification, social validation, relationship development, and social control” (1468).  Blogs truly are the fastest – and most economical and environmentally safe – way to disseminate information in modern times.  Baumgardner and Richards agree; although internet petitions lack plans and specific agendas, the internet is “a truly essential organizing tool when it is used correctly, disseminating information about demonstrations and legislation without killing a single tree” (296).  It is no surprise, then, that social media, blogging in particular, is becoming the new face of activism, especially for feminists, giving them a venue to express their ideas, create awareness, and call followers to action.  People are using social media to write and distribute their ideas to a broad audience and, unlike pamphlets or other hard-copy documents, the information presented in these blogs is both easily shared to a broad audience – via e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, etc. – and is part of a conversation.  Instead of Socrates’ concern with the written word “that it stabilizes ideas, so that writing falsely represents ideas as frozen in time, ripped from the living, human situations in which they naturally move” (cited in Lindquist and Seitz 27), a blog is instead a living, breathing, changeable document to which an audience can respond, and an author can change as he/she sees fit.  This kind of easily distributable dialogue is rapidly changing the way activists find and share their information.

Women have a different way of writing and sharing information than men do, though, which is what makes feminist bloggers so different than any other kind of blogger.  In the essay, “The Impact of Women’s Studies on Rhetoric and Composition,” Hildy Miller first briefly explores the history of composition, beginning with Aristotle and Plato.  Then, Miller moves into talking about women’s perspective on writing.  She discusses the difference between men’s and women’s processes of writing, how men and women respond to rhetorical situations differently, and what it means to compose as a woman.  She also discusses ways in which women experience writing differently.  For example, she says many women experience writer’s block differently than men because of their long history of being silenced (21-22).  According to Miller, women experience writing differently and, therefore, experience literacy events within an online community differently, which makes feminist online activism so unique.