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02/16/2006 Archived Entry: "Blog Conversations"

Blog Conversations
The Girl: What the hell is wrong with your blog?
Me:: What do you mean?
The Girl: It makes no sense. In fact, every day it makes less sense.
Me: I don't know what you are talking about.
The Girl: All that wacky crap you are doing. What is that supposed to be about? People are going to think you are messed up.
Me: I guess you'd rather I write about my day, how cold it gets in Detroit, my academic complaints, my anti-WPA-L stances, some co-authored review of a text on a super intense bloggers site, etc.
The Girl: Don't get testy.
Me: Blogs are fun. Blogs are enjoyable. Blogs can be Barthes' pleasure of the text. Blogs are not the new CV, as Clay implies, or at least not in a way the O'Reilly piece argues. If this is a CV, it is a digital one. It is a series of links and connections, alter-egos, explorations, thought-probes, as McLuhan might say. It is me, but not in the same way a CV represents me. It is professional and personal. It is the digital update of Barthes by Barthes. "In what he writes, there are two texts." Ah yes. Text I is the fear (oh bloggers know fear....they embrace it too much). Caught in fear, bloggers forget about Text II! "Text II is active, moved by pleasure. But as it is written, corrected, accommodated to the fiction of Style, Text I becomes active too. . ."
The Girl: Whatever. Now I'm hungry. I wish I went shopping today.
Me: The most boring blogs are the ones which shove the familiar into this daily hyperlinked space. They are as creative as the academic essays the blogs' authors write. That is why so many academic blogs are full of paranoia and short of any kind of thinking. THE FAMILIAR DOESN'T FIT! I'M SCARED. In place of new kinds of ideas, we get anxiety. The news can never understand technology because it is stuck in anxiety ("Do your kids blog or IM? Then you might want to hear how they might be in danger").
The Girl: STOP SHOUTING GEEK!
Me: We've seen this already with the essay. In the graduate seminar I teach, last week we discussed visuality and the digital (in specific and broad contexts). I introduced Barthes' "The Rhetoric of the Image" in order to explore the structured meaning (Italianicity!) and the non-structured meanings which come up in his later work. And what about Academicicity? How have we visualized it? I was reminded of how false such images can be when so much opportunity for exploration is there for us to seize. Academicicity has become as natural as the Italianicity in the image Barthes examines. And yet. . . there is no such thing as Academicicity except for the denotative and connotative meanings we apply to it. That is why we need third meanings, punctums, jouissance. We need other meanings - not as replacements, but as openings. If we are too stuck in denotation and connotation, we never understand those kinds of meanings (affective) that neither accounts for. Blogs need that too.
The Girl: I gotta go. The Daily Show is on. Bye!
Me: Hello? Hello? Hello?