Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
A bit lost
Submitted by Shock and Awe on 10 September 2006 - 1:49pm.
I'm feeling a bit lost regarding what we want this blog to be. The Writing Machines Blog. So far it seems to be of the fubu, for us by us, variety. Which is fine. We trade links we feel will pertain to the class and stimulate discussion. We probe and comment on the assigned readings. We reference one another.
I guess what I'm confused about is whether blogs owe something to the general public. They are open forums. On the remote chance that some random individual stumbles upon the Writing Machines blog is it our duty as bloggers to try to interest them in the content? To give them something that will make them want to read more, and maybe even link to us? I'm so used to public literature that does this. In every creative writing and journalism class I've taken the primary focus has been on engaging and holding the interest of the reader. There's a relationship between writer and reader. When you publish something you want your audience to read and enjoy it, so you try to make it readable and enjoyable. The blogs linked to(blogroll) on this page all do that. They have humor, or continuous narrative, or subject matter that appeals to either the general or a niche audience, or some hook to keep readers coming back for more.
I'm not trying to criticize any of your posts, or steer this blog in a particular direction, I'm just feeling, as I said in the beginning, a bit lost on what we are trying to do. Is our goal with this blog simply to continue class discussions, or are we trying to appeal to a broader audience? On a technical level, can anyone explain to me how likely it is that anyone else will ever read this blog? I know Prof F told us not to use our real names, which gave me the exciting sense that we could be posting illicit and subversive information that would be read by the pulic and could later come back to haunt us if our true identities were discovered.
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Also lost
I'm also a bit confused on the nature of this blog. I assumed that the content would make our blogs only appealing to people in the class, though I suppose other people outside Pomona studying the same thing might find some reactions to our readings, class discussions, etc interesting. I'm interested to see what others say in response to your post, and I think it will be cool to see how our blogs develop over the course of the semester. Will they become more personal? More of simply a mix of everything--reactions to readings, class discussions, other blogs? And will they rely on each other’s posts, or will they be very distinct for each person?
Your post brings up the
Your post brings up the interesting question of honesty and motivation in the blogging world. Do bloggers say exactly what they want, or is there a process of self-censorship because of the very public nature of blogs. Do they write what they truly feel, or do they cater to their audience? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I do believe that a large portion of bloggers are very aware of their audience and thus skew or alter their writing to cater to them.
I think it's very likely that somebody randomly searching for blogs will run across this class blog. When I googled "Writing Machines," this site was one of the top 10 results out of over 67 million search results. However, that said, I think that we are still writing with the assumption that 99% of the readership will be people in this class.
To take a stab at your questions, I think we should write whatever interests us, whatever we want to say in regards to the readings and the subject of blogging in general, and we do not owe anything to the public. Hopefully what we post will be inherently interesting and will engage the outside reader anyway, so we won't have to worry about going out of our way to please anybody.
I think (correct me if I'm
I think (correct me if I'm wrong), but you seem to assume a public (and anonymous) readership and audience. Just because they're there doesn't mean you have to cater to them. Theoretically, we should all cater to our real audience - that is, Prof F--. Or each other, if that's who we're in conversation with.
the pseudo anonymity is fascinating.
no, no, no!
Please no catering to me. And please no blogging as if I'm the "real audience." If I wanted that, I'd just have you turn in weekly reading responses.
It is extremely important to me that you all think about your writing here in relation to a broader sense of audience -- your colleagues in the class, at minimum, but also anyone who happens by. Folks interested in the stuff we're reading and discussing. Think of this as "engaging" rather than "catering to" your audience. Ideally, I want you to engage other students and scholars of electronic literature, as well as the random googler. But most of all, I want you to engage yourself.