Small Strokes Big Oaks

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Speaking of blogging for social good, I’m beginning the second part of the Literacy in the Feminist Blogging Community project for my master’s thesis (which will be finished in May!), which means I need more people to participate in the interview!  If you are a blogger and you write for women, about women, or even about equality in general, I want YOU!  Send me an e-mail at samsanator(at)gmail(dot)com to participate!

What follows is the (yet again) updated proposal for the project.

Topic and Background
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.  Although Miller and Shepherd argue that blogs “seem to serve no immediate practical purpose” (1451), I believe that this kind of easily distributable dialogue is rapidly changing the way activists find and share their information.
Miller and Shepherd go on to say that “The blog is a new rhetorical opportunity, made possible by technology that is becoming more available and easier to use, but it was adopted so quickly and widely that it must be serving well established rhetorical needs” (1451).  These rhetorical needs may include a voyeuristic need to share and read personal information, as Miller and Shepherd posit (1454), but it may also include a need to distribute political information quickly and effectively.  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 (https://smallstrokesbigoaks.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.

Method
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 will combine a participant-observation research of a field site and ethnographic interviews in order to complete a discourse centered online ethnography.  According to Jannis Androutsopoulos in her article “Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography,” an online ethnography “combines the systematic observation of selected sites of online discourse with direct contact with its social actors” (2).  I will be using several feminist blogs as sites and evidence of texts, and I will also 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.
Because the bloggers chosen for this project are all over the world, interviews must be conducted via e-mail.  I will introduce myself and give pertinent background information (age, location, occupation, education) to the bloggers, and ask them to send me the same.  I will then ask the first set of preliminary questions, which ask them to tell me stories about their blogging and internet community experiences and include guiding questions to help the interviewee think of specific literacy events in their experiences:

1.    Define the online feminist blogging community.  How does it exist online?  Is it beneficial for feminists to have a presence on the internet?  Explain.  How did you become involved in the community?  How do you, personally, use the community?  Does it benefit you in any way?  How?  Does such a community make online writing a commodity to be promoted and “sold,” or does it help provide awareness in a different way?
2.    Tell me about how you came to be a blogger.  Why did you start blogging?  What did you write about at first?
3.    Tell me about your blogging experience now.  Why do you blog?  What do you write about?  If it is not the same as when you started, why did you change?
4.    Tell me about a time you were misread or misunderstood on your blog.  How did you feel?  How did you react?  Did other readers/members of the community come to your aide?
5.    Describe your process of writing online.  How is it different than your other writing practices?  Do you have a routine you follow when you are writing online?
6.    Describe your online reading habits.  How do you find interesting online reading material?  How do you share reading material?  Does this finding and sharing help create an online community?  Explain.

After receiving the first round of answers to these questions, I may follow up with other questions, depending on the responses I receive.  The second round of questions will be particular to each interviewee, and will only be conducted if necessary.

Participants and Sites
•    Sabrina P. Caprioli – http://hunterequality.blogspot.com
•    Liza Donnelly – http://lizadonnelly.com/
•    Sharna Fulton – http://www.chloepinkcartoon.blogspot.com/
•    Sally Mercedes – http://jumpoffthebridge.com
•    Amanda ReCupido – http://www.undomesticgoddess.com
•    Mary Lee Shalvoy – http://maryleeshalvoy.wordpress.com/
•    Laura Sundstrom – http://adventuresofayoungfeminist.com
•    Esmeralda Tijhoff – http://www.fonkel.net/
•    Rebecca Welzenbach – http://littlehelpplease.blogspot.com
Because every week or so I receive a new set of answers to these interview questions, the raw interview material and a complete list of participants can be found at https://smallstrokesbigoaks.com/?tag=literacy-interview.

Analysis
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).  Through the interviews and the monitoring of the participants’ individual sites, I hope to gain a greater understanding of how feminism exists as an online culture and how participation in that culture affects the ways in which they read and write.  As Miller and Shepherd write, “When bloggers talk about blogging, two themes relevant to these questions are ubiquitous: self-expression and community development” (1461).  I will be focusing on both of these themes in my study; I will be studying their literacy practices within the feminist blogging community to discover how they use their unique forms of self-expression to create a community by linking to and commenting on each other’s blogs (Miller and Shepherd 1462).
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. In this way, I will be performing a sort of rhetorical analysis on the blogging community in which the rhetor is the writer of the blog, the audience are the other community members and readers, and the issue is feminism.  Particularly, I will use Szwed’s five elements of literacy – text, context, function, participants, and motivation – to analyze the literacy events the participants share with me.  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.

Works Cited

• Androutsopoulos, Jannis.  “Potentials and Limitations of Discourse-Centred Online Ethnography.” Language@Internet, 5 (2008), article 9. 7 July 2009 <http://www.languageatinternet.de>.
• Lindquist, Julie and David Seitz.  The Elements of Literacy.  New York: Longman, 2009.
• Miller, Carolyn R. and Dawn Shepherd.  “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog.”  The Norton Book of Composition.  Susan Miller, ed.  New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009.  1450-1473.