Quest / Romance

It’s amazing how much the definition of “what a blog is” has shifted. Will R. started something while I was busy doing other stuff, and his latest post on the topic really encapsulates the way I felt about the activity of blogging soon after I started:

But I’ve never in my life written the way I write in this Weblog. And frankly, I don’t know that I’ve learned as much from any other type of activity as I have from this type. And I learn when I’m doing just what I’m doing now (sweat on brow.) I’m not journaling. I’m not just linking. I’m attempting to synthesize a lot of disparate ideas from a varitey of sources into a few coherent sentences that I can publish for an audience and wait (hope?) for its response to push my thinking further. That’s the essence of blogging to me, and I can’t do it without a Weblog. That’s the distinction. That’s what tells me this is different. And that’s what makes me think so hard about the effects that blogging, not just using a blog, might have in a classroom.

Dennis commented briefly about it, and it reminded me a lot of how the whole link-post-comment argument unfolded around two years ago. Early adopters didn’t believe that the whole “metacognitive” aspect that the newer people (like me) enjoyed was productive for blogging as a genre. That was writing, not blogging according to their definition. Blogging required links. Now, the terms seem to have come full circle. However, Will’s contentious assertions about blogging seem to be software driven. Instead of linking to other sites (commentary on the web), the distinction promoted is raised another level—blogging is commenting on other people’s commentary. The model is conversational. I’m not sure I agree.

I also started thinking about the Webquest learning model. It reminded me of the assertion that Harold Bloom made about romanticism. Romanticism was the internalization of medieval quest romance. Instead of searching the countryside for a fair maiden, the quest was to know oneself. The quest turned inward. Given the latest take on “web quests” it seems that we want to get away from looking at how writing tools change a person, and move back to the middle ages and look at it as a quest for knowledge outside ourselves. I’m not sure that this change is all that productive.

Myself, I find that if I spend too much time commenting and conversing about other people’s posts, I have less time to really develop my own thoughts. There needs to be some kind of balance, I think. I think it has to do with the size of the community involved. What was once a small community is now huge; it is too exhausting to keep up on it all. Staying “local” has its advantages. For one thing, it allows you to maintain a better sense of your own identity, and it keeps you from changing to suit a peculiar audience construct. I really want to think locally, at this point, rather than globally. Thinking globally is too draining on my tiny intellectual resources.