#ToBlogOrNotToBlog

This week our readings dive into the very important question of, "What is a blog?." In a piece by Mary Garden, on defining blogs, she gives direct quotes from a Pew Research project about the defining of blogs. Pew Project director Lee Rainie says:

 "I would say absolutely we’re dealing with a term that is not particularly well defined because            blogging is a platform. Blogs can be so many different things to so many different people. The            definition needs to be more about structure than content."

Jeff Jarvis, veteran journalist and blogger, takes a radical position: 

"There is no need to define ‘blog’. A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content … Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining ‘blog’ is a fool’s errand."

Boyd found through her ethnographical research that veteran bloggers were usually irritated by the definition question, finding it a futile exercise. For example, ‘Carl’ says: 

"I’ve given up on definitional questions and gone for these tautologies. Like blogging is what we do when we say, ‘We’re blogging.’ … It’s a blog because a blogger’s doing it … It’s a blog because bloggers are engaged with it, and everyone points at it and says ‘It’s a blog!’"

So what does this mean? If researchers cannot define a over twenty year-old phenomenon, can we? Or does the definition even matter? I believe that to those who blog or know about blogs it doesn't. The increasing number of blogs over the past ten years have shown us that somehow this idea is spreading and it is giving different spectrum of people in completely different parts of the world a way to reflect and connect, defined or not. 

The next article by Torill Elvira Mortensen discusses the main purpose of our whole semester; as well as, the stigma of blogging in the academic culture. This author disscuss the movement and purpose of blogs as being more of a "middle-brow" consumed market, and all but slams the middle-class working blogger by stating, "The common practice of blogging is rarely dominated by clear, touching prose, deep academic thinking, or political debate." While there are two separate and distinct groups, middle-brow and high-brow, 

While there tends to be a vast difference in the two classes of blogging, one for more of a diary use and one for professional research, that does not mean that the two cannot mix. Because, I believe to write a blog, academic or personal, you must in some way put forth your personal opinion about the subject which blurs the lines a bit between strictly subjectively academic, and personal. This seems to be, in my opinion, the issue for the stigma. Blogs have retained this impression to be strictly for our diary use, but they are not. They can be used in ways to further education, such as this course. 

This article, like the third one on Power Laws, show that a certain group of people are making up and deciding what is needing to be read; however if there were more blogs to choose from, these power laws might actually turn into more bell curves, giving some balance between academia and society.

I will leave you with a quote from Mortensen: 

"Ultimately, communication happens as human beings create meaning from a set of signals which we can call signs. The practice of receiving and communicating this meaning is where we need to look, if we wish to make an attempt at breaking out of the symbolic universe within which we have all been trained. Weblogs and webloggers have one advantage in this attempt."

#MyTopEight

What exactly are we saying about ourselves on social media? Are we telling a story? Are we writing in our digital public diary? Do we even realize that once something is posted, its out there forever? These are all great questions to ask, and all questions this week's articles seek to answer.

Social media and social network sites (SNSs) have created a new culture in our world. Before you have time to pick up the phone to chat with a friend you can know exactly how their day has been, via the social sites. What does this mean then? Where did all of this begin. Boyd and Ellison answer this question for us in their research, "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." They define SNSs as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system." They discuss that through the first major social sites like Friendster and Myspace, this culture was born.

Everyone totally remembers when the only thing that mattered was who was in your top eight, who's top eight you were in, and what song was playing on your profile. Growing up in this era, a new culture was created where there was a new way to interact and socialize. Then, after moving away from being a college only site, all of the previous Myspacers moved to Facebook. Boyd & Ellison along with Page, Harper & Frobenius discuss what exactly our profiles say about us, what story they tell.

From 2008 to 2012 the range of limitations on what Facebook users can do has grossly expanded. Only a few short years ago we could only write words in a box, now we can tag, tweet, link, check-in, add pictures, and all but create a hologram of ourselves to these updates. So what does what we put on our profiles say about us? Page, Harper & Frobenius discuss in-depthly the narratives we portray about who we are and how we feel through what we post. Cultures and niches are formed throughout the social networking world and they truly mimic our lives. Andre Brock writes about African American culture on sites such as twitter. These niches created by certain races or cultures only mirror our lives. As human we stay in our comfort zones, we follow or friend who we know or would like to know, celebrities or athletes we admire, and the companies we support. To me it has little to do with race and a lot to do with the story we are telling about ourselves, whether that be who we actually are or who we want people to perceive us as.

Social media and social networking sites, if not already, will soon take over how we look at the information we give and receive. To that, there is much need for research to be done in these fields about how to capture an audience that is so 5 minutes ago.

#meme

What exactly is a meme? There is actually academic studies for this cultural phenomenon call memetics, and as described by Davi Johnson, in Mapping the Meme, it is the emerging and contested science of the "meme." When asked what a meme is some might think of Kermit...

or this lady...

What do these new form of social "propaganda"  actually say about our culture? Through the research and writings of Johnson, Jenkins, Shifman, Wiggins and Bowers I have come to better understand the history behind something I have always found as entertainment. Having no clue the study of memetics originated in 1976 through the book The Selfish Gene by biologist Richard Dawkins. This is quite interesting because we see this emergence of memes only recently, or at least that is when they exploded. Scholars suggest that there is no room for this virtual hilarity in the academic setting, but is there?

Why are these so popular? I believe they have become a new way to express ourselves, a new way to be parodize what is happening in pop and world culture. Let's take the famous and beautiful Ryan Gosling. Due to his ability to be innocent and play the loving and manly roles in great movies he has become the poster man for all preppy and scholarly memes. If this is a way to gain attention why is academic literature not tapping into this way to make learning fun for adults? Shifman suggests that memes must be imitated, remixed, and rapidly diffused, a perspective we could share and carry further to modify.

Wiggins and Bowers define Internet memes as as the spreadable media that have been remixed or parodied as emergent memes which are then iterated and spread online as memes. These memes progress and persist due to dynamic interaction among members of our participatory digital culture. Clearly these memes have emerged as our new form of SNL, or YouTube channel so why have they been almost banned from academia.

If you take a look at many of the University of South Alabama Sakai sites you will see that there are memes used to "break the ice" between online teachers and their prospective students. Personally I have seen multiple ones about public speaking, award shows, and history. Johnson states that memes use us to alter their environments so that their chances for replication are enhanced. If we as academic students and researchers are trying to spread information and teach others about our chosen subjects, why not use something that spreads like wildfire. Let's be honest, within fifteen minutes of Jameis Winston falling down for no apparent reason in the play-off game there were a multitude of memes and videos created to poke fun at the slip-up.  

I am not saying that using memes is altogether the best and most effective way to teach higher education, but I am saying that it doesn't hurt to open up the doors and windows to the coming future or education. In closing, if you have a message to send, or need to get a good laugh just create or look up memes and you are sure to get a good laugh.