Small Strokes Big Oaks

What follows is the proposal for my interview about literacy practices among feminist bloggers. Any one else want to participate? Any suggestions for improvement?

Project Proposal

I am fascinated by technological literacy and how social media, blogging in particular, is becoming the new face of activism. 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 – 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” (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.

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 just 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. There is a whole set of rules and etiquette that goes along with participating in a community such as this, and literacy – reading, writing, and conversation – takes on a whole new meaning. Through Twitter and my own blog (http://smallstroke.wordpress.com), I have become involved in the feminist blogging community, and I am interested in exploring the definitions and uses of literacy within this community. Particularly, I want to focus on Szwed’s five elements of literacy – text, context, function, participants, and motivation – and how they play out among feminist bloggers.

The nature of the internet is such that there is no real “site” to observe, and because each blogger’s style can be so different and it takes a community of people to spread the word about blogs in order to get the kind of readership needed for real change, I would like to combine a participant-observation research of a field site and ethnographic interviews. I am interested in “the cultural identities [the bloggers] claim for themselves” and how they “affect the kinds of literacy behaviors they practice in different parts of their lives” (Lindquist and Seitz 231). In other words, I would like to use these feminist blogs as sites and evidence of texts, and I would also like to conduct several interviews with the bloggers themselves to collect their ideas of literacy and how this burgeoning technology effects how they read, write, discuss, and share information.

As I interview the participants and read their blogs, I will be looking for patterns or discrepancies in the way the participants think about their own literacy practices. I will then be using this information to discuss how literacy works and what types of literacy are employed within the culture of feminist bloggers, and hopefully I will come to a greater understanding of participation within this community.

Work Cited

Lindquist, Julie and David Seitz. The Elements of Literacy. New York: Longman, 2009.