All of us in NetRhets spent a couple of weeks reading Duncan Watts’ Six Degrees earlier this semester, which works through the formation of his contribution to network theory. Most everyone knows the six degree theory, thanks to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon: each of us is no more than six degrees distant from any other person.

So I’m thinking: there’s a friend of mine I haven’t seen in ten years. I haven’t been able to track her. My other friend who knew her and still lives in Little Rock can’t find her either. At least 75 people visit my blog each day, which means the chances that at least one of my readers would know of her would be pretty darned good.

And then I remembered that I already did this once, albeit inadvertantly. A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about rosemary in which I remembered a big healthy pet rosemary that belonged to a priest friend of mine. It turned out that he was the uncle of Michelle’s best friend. Michelle told L., who called A., who commented on my blog the next day and told me what had become of him and that rosemary.

So, people: I used to have a dear friend whose maiden name was Cynthia Crews, but we called her Sensua sometimes. We met while slinging pizzas and were friends for several years, one semester of which we spent shooting portraits of each other. She was funny and smart and hot, wore a Miss Brooks bob and went to New York to get her bottom lip pierced years before piercing became trendy (much less available in Arkansas). She went to Lollapalooza its first year, and turned me on to Jesus and Mary Chain, Dead Can Dance, and Jane’s Addiction. We had a crush on the same queer boy, who broke both of our hearts. She was a rather talented artist who showed and performed regularly on the local young-artists circuit, and when her parents divorced after a long marriage she decamped to Kansas City Art Institute. We wrote once or twice, and then never again. She came back and visited me once; I don’t remember what we did that day except go shopping for witch stockings. I’ve thought of her often ever since, and would love to know what’s become of her. If you see her, tell her that Mark misses her too.

Update: Collin found her! It had been several months since the last time I googled, and apparently I should have run one again today before embarrassing myself. I was hoping this would be resolved the by the knows-somebody-who-knows-somebody approach, but I’ll take it. Now, to email...

Posted at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

(Previously posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics, whose audience is less IP-centric.)

Reading through Urban’s The Once and Future Thing (nicely summarized by Derek), I was struck by how useful this might be for part of my intellectual property research. Then I came across Jen’s question:

How does culture move and progress if it is always at least tainted by the previous incarnation of culture?

I think the notion of derivative works is quite useful in working through Urban’s notions about accelerative culture. For those of you who aren’t intellectual property geeks, a derivative work is created when a previously existing work is “recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represents an original work of authorship, is a ‘derivative work’.“ (17 U.S.C. § 101 (1994).) The right to create derivative works is a right accorded to the copyright owner of texts, recordings, art, or videos under §106 of the copyright code. (There’s a much fuller discussion here, if you’re interested.) The Creative Commons movement as well as recent cases involving the legality of sampling have pushed the issue of derivative works to the front of the copyfight conversations.

Continue reading "The Once and Future Thing: Derivative Works" »

Posted at 11:32 AM | Permalink

(Initially written for Networked Rhetorics)

Back in early February, I sat on a panel with Dan Gillmor as he positioned blogs within the proverbial “long tail.” With the influence of bloggers on mainstream journalism, he says, the tail has begun to wag the dog.

He’s right on a couple of things: blogs are definitely part of the long tail, and some bloggers are beginning to have an astonishing influence on breaking news stories, perhaps most notably with the Rather scandal. There’s a lot of talk lately about bloggers as journalists, fueled both by Gillmor’s We The Media and the recent Apple suits against bloggers. I won’t argue with any of that.

I do think, however, that these theories are only applicable to a very small portion of the blog population. Yes, some very prominent bloggers devote themselves to breaking news and attendant commentary. I would also extend the “journalist” definition to the pundit blogs. These folks are not the long tail, though. They’re toward the front of it, and if we lopped off the tail just behind them we’d have a very stubby tail. The whole blogger-as-journalist metaphor just doesn’t account for what the rest of us do.

Rather than journalism, I think the print precedent for most of us lies in zines. Remember zine culture? You, or you and a friend or two, put together this weird little collection of stuff that had to do with your particular, peculiar interests. It didn’t appeal to the masses and it wasn’t meant to. I think most blogs follow the same principle � a way to announce yourself and the strange little star you follow. Some look more zine-like than others: The Heretik and Slight Publications are examples. But regardless of visual style, the majority of blogs I read are targeted at a zine-like niche audience. There’s only a certain number of people who want to read a blog about grad student musings, intellectual property, pinups and (currently) broken ankles. Only a specific audience wants to read about badass, hilarious mothers. Or a postmodernist priest. Or a bunch of dieters. Or a lyrical cook. Or fringe music Or a bunch of rhetoricians.

These people aren’t wagging the dog, and I suspect they really don’t care one way or the other. The majority of blogs are firmly situated in the long part of the long tail, in the funky little cultural crevices. They provide expression and community for writers who are, in one way or another, part of the cultural fringe, and they provide a means for the mainstream to stumble upon us. And I think that is what makes the medium so powerful, and so interesting.

Posted at 12:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the past two weeks, the Network(ed) Rhetorics class has been reading and discussing Duncan Watt’s Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. I’m poking along behind everyone else since I’m still not up to speed with my reading. The title refers, of course, to Milgram’s well-worn theory that we are all six degrees separated from each other (and Kevin Bacon).

I’ve been meandering along with this, thinking about how life on the Network has affected my own networks. When I started in this discipline, I only knew the people in my former department. I became very good friends (and fell in love with) one of them. He introduced me to blogging, and I started out by poaching reads off his blogroll. This situated me in the old U Blog community, as seen on one of AKMA’s ancient sidebars. This group was interdiscplinary and largely postacademic. Since I was a new blogger who possessed precious little social capital, I knew more of them than knew me. Now, two years later, I still read and/or talk with perhaps eight members of that community: AKMA, Mister Boyfriend, Dorothea, Tom, Steve, Joe, The Happy Tutor, and Mark Woods. I feel fiercely loyal to those eight. And eight people translates to a huge number within Watts’ network theory.

From that original network, I eventually followed links to a few Rhet/Comp bloggers. One of them was Clancy, who, if memory serves, I found through either AKMA or Michelle, who I know IRL. This was a good amount of time before I even considered applying to UMN. She linked me back. Then, quite by coincidence, Mister Boyfriend and I applied here. Because of the fact that we all read each other, it was fairly natural for Clancy and I to meet when I came up here to visit twice last year. And she introduced me to other departmental bloggers (Amy, Laurie, and Cristina) who all blogrolled me as a colleague before I ever formally showed up on their doorstep. It allowed me a friendship with Cristina, who moved to Philadelphia right when I moved here. In pre-blog days, I would have entirely missed her. Reading each other provided an impetus for Laurie and I to finally insist on having lunch together. And, particularly because of Clancy’s early efforts, I never had to feel like I didn’t know anyone here.

My growing connection to (and fondness for) the Syracuse Rhetoric folks is equally serendipitous. Through the Blog SIG Listserv launch, I met Derek, who was shopping for PhD programs at the same time I was. I’m not sure if I found Collin through him or Clancy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was either of them. Becky found me through Collin, and vice versa, and she and I have cheered each other on through our recent accidents. And my blog-connection with Collin allowed me access to the Network(ed) Rhetorics course, which gave me to opportunity to meet Madeline, Mike, Tyra, Dianna, Chris, Jen, Ty, Elisa, and Henry, plus Marcia at Mizzou.

Somewhere in there, I went to C’s and met a bunch of other bloggers in my discipline, including Scott-In-The-Flesh, who I’d talked to forever. (Because of Scott, I know Shelley.) And way back in the day, the Happy Tutor led me to Mike.

So. Started out knowing and reading one person. Ended up knowing all these people, which is just the people I remember how I found*. Also ended up with a 200-link blogroll consisting of people I know well and people I don’t know at all. Most of the Rhet/Comp people also know each other, since we are our very own small-world phenonmenon. It’s been an interesting exercise to puzzle all this out, remembering who came from where. Watts suggests that networks are small worlds, clustered together and interlinked within and without. This geneology seems to support that.

More on Watts later, probably.

*And I love all of you who I don’t remember how I found. Tell me how I found you!

Posted at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This week’s NetRhets topic is network literacy, which inevitably leads to some discussion of identity. Miles and Yuille list it as #5 on their Creative Computing Manifesto:

5. inside the network
Network literacy is the ability to engage with and represent yourself within the network.

With my static professional site, I have a fairly good idea of how I’m representing myself to the world. Representation on this blog, however, is far more problematic to me. One of the wonderful and confusing things about blogs is the fact that they’re one of the only documents that permit shifting identities within the document itself. Print is fixed; the author/originator/creator's identity is fixed with it, at least within that volume. An author's identity may shift over the course of their ouvre, but once an individual work is fixed, things don’t change within it. Not so for the blog, which as a dynamic digital document is much more of a living thing. As the blogger changes, the document changes with it. This demonstrated, public change is part of what makes long-term blogging and blog reading so worthwhile - Dorothea, Bobbi, and AKMA have all grown and changed since I began reading them three years ago, and their blogs don’t look or read the same as they did then. The problems have more to do with external researchers than they do with the bloggers themselves (although Bobbi may disagree, given the process she’s gone through lately with hers). How do you categorize something whose identity is constantly in flux? How do you account for the changeable nature of the document? We can work with the larger genre of blog, but what particular identity does it present, and when is it which identity?
I guess I’m writing this in support of my Syracusan colleagues, a good number of whom are new bloggers working on figuring out what their blog is all about. I’m not sure it will help to know this, but I still don’t know what my blog is about, not really. I asked a friend of mine a couple of months ago when I was working on the About page, and she said it was a "classy academic blog." That’s a really nice thing to say, I think, but it totally doesn’t match with that I think is going on here. Not that I have any idea what that would be.
When I first started blogging, it was much more frightening than exciting to contemplate the identity it presented to the world. My very early posts were strictly impersonal, focusing instead on reading response notes. I used a prefab MT template and kept the whole thing anonymous and genderless for the first six months. It probably took a year to become comfortable with the idea of constructing an identity, and then most of another year to actually get around to doing anything about it. (My ambivalence was partly compounded by the problems of dealing with a meatspace stalker. Interesting how life off the network affects life on the network. I’m still not prepared to analyze this part, or to talk much more about it.)
So I began as an academic blog, and supposed that I would blog my thesis when it came time to write it. Instead, I blogged almost none of it except the whining. My archives from that year are almost entirely personal, peppered with links to silly things I found on the Net. Since I’ve moved up here to start Ph.D. work, I’m suddenly more or less an academic blog again, although I can’t quite bring myself to identify as such. Mostly it’s about school because I don’t do anything else. Still, the focus shifts from week to week, and I shudder to think how it would be categorized within previously proposed quantitative blog categories.
What am I doing here now? What sort of identity does this blog reveal? I still don’t know. A mishmash, so far as I can tell. If any of you know what this is, feel free to tell me in the comments.

(Excerpt cross-posted to Networked Rhetorics.)

Posted at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over on the Networked Rhets blog, there’s been all kinds of discussion about blogs and genre. (My colleague Clancy also wrestled with this topic a while back.) I’ve been thinking about blog classifications a bit lately as well, since they figure into a research project I’m mapping out. In Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, Susan Herring and her group seem to have developed a working schema that classifies blogs as k-logs (knowledge-logs), journals, and filters. Most people seem to work along these lines, and some (like Van Dijck) differentiate between diaries and journals. The thing is, I don’t see my blog in any of those categories. Mine shifts from week to week. This past week, it's looked more like an k-log than anything else. Last week when I was complaining about my car for days on end, it looked more like a journal. And none of that accounts for the pinups. My blog is a digital commonplace book, and I ended up adding that category to my schema to account for the other mishmash folks like me.

Posted at 5:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

First up on the Network(ed) Rhetorics reading list is Lilia Efimova’s post, Blogging as Breathing, a response to discussions at BlogWalk Umea. I was fascinated by the answers to this question, particularly Ton’s post that she links to (which I use often in presentations) as well as AKMA’s briefer one (which is totally unrelated to BlogWalk, so far as I know.)

I keep blogging because it’s become part of what I do: part of how I learn, part of how I write, part of how I teach, part of how I think, part of how I keep up with technology.

I started blogging out of curiousity and because I wanted to improve my digital literacy. Because I was never very consistent with journals, I worked it into the requirements of an independent study in order to force myself to post. I continued because of the people I “met” - at first friendly meetings, and then professional ones. I keep it up because I can't imagine doing things any other way at this point.

When I give talks on blogging, I always talk about this most recent stage - because academics always want to know how anyone could have time for something like a blog. Not only have blogs become a strong element of my research, they've become part of how I do that research. I find articles and books through other bloggers. I keep up with developing research as the researchers blog it. (Same for developing technologies. I would never have known about deli.cio.us if Jill hadn’t been so enthusiastic about it.) I store research and catalogue it on my blog - witness the ten zillion categories (currently under revision). The blog is where I put all the stuff that needs to be filed and all the stuff that has nowhere else to go - the posts about rosemary and cymbal monkeys and redhead pinups. I say on my About page that I think of the blog as a commonplace book (a la Tom Matrullo), and it really is like a digital version of the big blank artist’s books that I scribbled in and pasted stuff into for years. Elouise Oyzon calls her blog her “external memory”, and I think that’s quite an accurate description too.

Finally, of course, the blog really is a link to a social network. I never really expected blogging to have professional benefits, but I wouldn't have known Collin or Derek or any of the folks in the CCCC Blog SIG* if not for our blogs. I wouldn’t have the opportunity to take this class. Heck, I probably wouldn’t know about half of my colleagues if not for blogging. And I wouldn't know all the other wonderful folks on my blogrolls, the artists and poets and everyday magic folks. After reading someone every day for years, you feel like you know them, even to the point of inviting them to stay at your house. (I’ve received two invitations from long-time blog buddies in the past three months, both of whom have never really met me, ever. And I’d be just as willing to have them in my house, assuming that we actually had a room that was comfortable for them.) And, of course, I likely wouldn’t be with Mister Boyfriend if not for his blog. (Although that was before I started blogging.)

So blogging isn’t “extra” at this point. It’s how I live many aspects of my life. It is, as Lilia says, like breathing, like drinking. After two years, it’s just necessary.**

*To which all you Networked Rhets folks are coming, yes?
**None of this enthusiastic rambling explains my equally necessary annual summer hiatus, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.
***This post was brought to you by the letter K, the number 3, and the parenthetical reference.

Posted at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)