As I reflect on my comfort level with writing a collaborative autoethnography in the digital space I’m struck by how comfortable I feel with the medium while recognizing the apprehensions I feel writing with, or more accurately, being read by, others.
Writing in the blog interface is inviting to me. I find the format and the design conducive to writing in an informal style that feels more like starting a conversation than presenting a set of finished ideas. After I write a blog post I often spend the next few days checking back for comments. I notice how I’m more inclined to be reflective about little things in my life and to want to write about them. The downside for me is finding a momentum that works. If I were posting and reading more on the Blogging4CR blog I think I would be more engaged in the project. I’m reflecting now on how feminist issues raised by Shout Out JMU bloggers are constantly on my mind because I am reading them everyday. Although I’ve scaled back my public commenting on their blog posts I am often sharing ideas and trying to continue conversations via the Shout Out Facebook group. With our blog posts I find it tough to drop in and out of blogging mode. At the same time, it’s hard to make time for reflections that are of “scholarly” quality.
This is where the tension surfaces for me between this blog-style collaborative autoethnographic writing and blogging. The questions that stunt my inclination to contribute more freely to our blog are: Are my thoughts academic enough at this stage? Are my reflections transferable to feminist pedagogy? Should I be including citations in my blog posts? Is this really a blog or rather academic writing in a blog interface?
These questions lead me to take another look at how I understand this collaborative blogging as method project. I suppose in my ideal vision, we would write a bit more like bloggers. We would write more frequently – responding to blog prompts as well as contributing quick reflections on issues related to feminist pedagogy, living our feminism, and engaging in digital feminism as they occur in our lives. And then, the process of collaborative analysis and development of an academic argument would be part of a stage two where the blog is essentially our data or text. But, I realize now that because we haven’t discussed our process or plan in a while that I get stuck in the apprehension of what our “blog writing” really should be and if my approach is measuring up.
Reading back over this post I notice that I haven’t focused explicitly on accountability or audience. I think that’s probably telling. I’m somewhat used to writing for the ambiguous audience that allows me to distance myself from accountability to some extent. I feel accountable to bringing ideas to our conversations, but mostly I feel like I’m writing to an audience of friends or like-minded people – so it’s pretty easy for me to put my cards on the table with limited censorship. This perspective shifts when I wonder how our process of blogging is transformed into a scholarly work.
I appreciate you for addressing the pink elephant in my digital room that keeps me from being fully engaged/invested in this blog. When I think about this blog I waver between looking at it as an archival account of our intellectualizing of feminist blogging (teaching it, etc)…so I feel pressure to make original, informed, and critically reflexive in my posts OR looking at this blog as an unfolding conversation that can be as casual and constant as digital communication shared with say, my sister.
I agree–our writing would benefit from being more blog-like. And while this forum is technically a blog, I think the relative privacy/lack of being public or on digital display with my posts on this blog allows me to get lazy with my engagements on it.
What are your thoughts?
I appreciate your honesty about the engagement aspect and think you’re on target about the idea of more regular encounters. I know (just like in my email), it’s easy for me to just say “I don’t have time, I need to put this on the back burner” since I don’t have a looming deadline with a publisher or a public audience holding me accountable for a daily blog post.
For me though, if our blog was public – I would retrench to more academic writing and would feel like my time might be better spent on something else because I’d lose the benefits of process writing that I see as the primary vehicle toward something more transformative. I would feel far less safe and less open to write about how I am processing something. I see the blog as a platform that is a substitute for autoethnographic interactive interviewing in a face-to-face context – which is actually a process I feel so much more comfortable with anyways. So instead of sitting around a table biweekly (bimonthly, etc) with a tape recorder and a question to facilitate a set of narratives, we are writing in a digital platform that is more aligned with our question of interests – digital feminist pedagogies and identities.
Alison, I think it’s possible to build more energy, momentum, and accountability into a private blog. That said, I’m not sure how to do it. I think some of it could come with clarifying our expectations for the content and the style of posts we are writing and setting deadlines that we hold one another accountable to. I almost wonder about setting up a few meetings where we do talk f2f about some of our posts and the development of ideas so that our conversations take place on multiple levels. Melissa, I agree that making it public would change the extent to which I’m willing to just get ideas out there vs. trying to refine and polish my thoughts & writing. Though for it to more closely mirror sitting with a tape recorder I do think there has to be some way of bring us all to the digital table with more temporal cohesion.