Hypertextual Happenstance

This blog has been created to reflect upon learning to write and research this electronic medium. These posts use Jay David Bolter's _Writing Space_ as my theoretical guide to describe how I've learned to understand hypertext as the dynamic interconnection of a set of symbolic elements.

Thursday, September 30, 2004

That Bitch!

A recent discovery, no one is as candid a blogger or does a better job linking than Bitch Ph.D. I think I have too much of an ego right now to remain anonymous, although I understand her reasoning when she refers to herself as “paranoid” academic and her blog as a “a space to try to figure it out (geographic discontent means leaving your therapist behind) without having to worry about adding "indiscreet and self-sabotaging" to "lazy and disorganized" as self-descriptors.” Perhaps I should turn anonymous, but I think I have been careful to control any anger and only use initials when naming friends and posting pictures of them. Maybe when I start the job search I’ll start a separate blog—I’m sure anything that resembles conservative MLA practices will piss me off and I’ll have to let off steam somewhere!

But forget about the
explicit content (recently noticed in The Guardian), in terms of linking practices, Bitch Ph.D. takes Bolter’s comparison of hypertext to modernism and runs with it, particularly in this post when she includes links to 6 separate blogs in the first sentence! Challenging her readers to notice that each word is a separate link, and then to follow those links and come back to finish reading her lengthy post, Bolter would describe her electronic writing as “constructive” since hypertext, defined broadly, is “the dynamic interconnection of a set of symbolic elements” (38). Echoing Bolter is Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People who describes blogs as post-centric rather than page-centric. However, I venture to say that they are also link-centric. Yes, Bitch Ph.D. draws readers in with her blog’s title, passionate voice and vulgar language, but what I find establishes her credibility and is more revealing is who she links to in her posts and on her blogroll.

I’m proud to say that she’s added me to “The once and future professoriate” category, which also includes Michael Bérubé!

Sunday, September 19, 2004

Remediation is the name of the game/Imitation is the highest form of flattery

…and the easiest way to learn the power of a tool! While my ability to link to various online sources gained momentum as the weeks of the Fall semester continued, my most creative spurts came from titling posts as you can see from any of the titles from October 2003, e.g., “Is anyone reading this blasted thing-a-ma-blog?”

Then I read
this post by former and current classmate William and his choice of linking the word “trouble,” totally intrigued me. I believe Dr. Moxley also noted it in one of his weekly email assessments of our blogs, which also drew my attention to it. I had not considered the significance of choosing certain words to link and previously had only chosen the obvious: essay titles and names. From then on I’ve taken more time to think about which words to highlight when inserting the link I plan to share. I’ve progressed from this time in November 2003 with the word “here” to my more visually rhetorical practice of hyperlinking the posted picture. And no matter what computer you use to read my blog, if it is set to hover over links in a certain way or not, my blatant use of color [usually pink—see the comments to this post for a student asking me about that] to emphasize the links is now part of my practice.

Linking to me is the most important part of blogging and echoes what Jay David Bolter says about the remediation of print. I close this post with several key statements of his (44-45):

Hypertext is a process as much as a product…

In its emphasis on process and on the reader’s awareness of the medium, hypertext seems to belong to the literary tradition of modernism…

Electronic writing in general and hypertext in particular can be both old and new, because the process of remediation must acknowledge both their connection with and their difference from print…

New media are always new in their redeployment and refashioning of their predecessors…


Friday, September 17, 2004

Stay away from the Kairos!

Now that I have re-read that Searching the Blogosphere post, I think I was actually referring to the group blog, KairosNews and not the journal Kairos. But that serves as a nice segue into discussing why I hardly ever blog at KairosNews.

If you look at the two posts I have created there, here and here, the latter includes my confession that I am not a techy, only a blogger. It is one thing to click on a globe/chainlink icon, and a completely other thing to be told “All HTML tags allowed.” Huh?

Sad to say it, but I am not even worried about the fact that I don’t know HTML. Has the ease of blogging software made me this way? Probably, but as my further examination and reflection upon this new medium will tell you, it’s the world wide audience and opportunity to participate in civic discourse that appeals most to me.

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

The Awk of August

If you read my posts of August 2003, particularly this one on “Searching the Blogosphere,” you’ll see that I’ve included an awkward mixture of both pasting entire URLs into the textbox and hyperlinking to publications like The Guardian and Kairos. It was Joe Moxley who showed me that all I had to do was copy the URL, highlight the words that corresponded to the link, click on the globe/chainlink icon, and then paste in the URL there. Who knew it would be that simple!?!?! But it was, and within a week, I was soon linking all over the place.

I even wrote in my blog about it. In a post entitled “Those Bloody Links,” I reference the work of Rebecca Blood, author of the blog “Rebecca’s Pocket” and The Weblog Handbook, one of the assigned texts for the Rhetoric and Technology course. As we were told to “just play” with nearly every technological tool we were introduced to instead of offered clear instruction on how each could and should be used, I would turn to Blood’s book often for the context and ethics of blogging.

Monday, September 13, 2004

Got Moxie?

Time magazine's June 21, 2004 article "Meet Joe Blog" offers the perfect starting point for this post:

In a way, blogs represent everything the Web was always supposed to be: a mass medium controlled by the masses, in which getting heard depends solely on having something to say and the moxie to say it.

Enter The Mox/Moxie/Joe Moxley:

On our first day of Rhetoric and Technology, we each had to create a blog and I chose to do so at Blogger. However, at that time, they did not have a Comments feature, and since Dr. Moxley wanted to be able to leave us feedback, I didn’t last long there. To be honest, some of the more tech savvy students found a string of code that those of us at Blogger could paste in, and I did, (well they did it for me), but then
this happened, and I moved to the big blog-city.

Plain and simple, I chose blog-city because I liked the idea of titling my posts, which Blogger also didn’t have back then. You see, I’ve been jotting down chapter titles for books I will never write for years now, so the thought of daily chapter titles was going to be fun! And luckily, it was early enough for me to take the time and re-post all of my initial blog posts in that new space.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Rhetorical Question

Why did I choose to take a course entitled Rhetoric and Technology instead of Classical Rhetoric?

Well, once settled in Tampa, armed with my brand new Sony Vaio, flat screen monitor, and cable modem, and of course lacking any social life whatsoever, the tools were all I had. And being the less theoretical and more pragmatic academic that I am, I wanted to learn new tools instead of reading Plato and Aristotle. Consider it either the easy way out or as easing myself back into academia…

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Pre/blog

Unlike Winston Weather in his book An Alternate Style, before late August 2003, I had NOT been “asking simply to be exposed to, and informed about, the full range of compositional possibilities” (2). Nor was I asking to “be introduced to all the tools, right now,” or “that all the ‘ways’ of writing be spread out before me and that my education be devoted to learning how to use them” (2). Nope. That wasn’t me. Sure, I knew I was returning to school and beginning my PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition, but I purposefully spent the summer on less academic and certainly less technological adventures, as I mention in this post and this one.

Monday, September 06, 2004

Hypersensitive to Hypertext

Before I began blogging, I had no idea how to hyperlink, or what exactly hypertext was. So when I started you would see long posts like the previous one, until I realized that other bloggers wrote very short posts and the point was to link to other places, not necessarily give it all to you in one textbox.

Yet too proud to ask or teach myself, I avoided what I thought was a complicated process. I thought creating and publishing anything online required superior knowledge of programming codes or intricate software. But that’s not the case with blogging. It’s so simple, kind of like word processing kicked up a notch, and sites like Blogger (whose motto is “Push Button Publishing”) and Blog-City (whose emphasis is on community and “building your neighborhood”), have made it even simpler in the year I’ve been blogging.

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

Blog the Blogger and Walk the Walker

How do I explain this new medium to other people who haven’t heard of the word “blog”? What definition do I give those luddites/non-bloggers? Well, usually I just say “an online diary.” However, I really don’t think that definition says anything about the power of the genre. Jill Walker, author of the blog jill/txt, has written the ultimate definition of “weblog” for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory to be published in 2005:

A weblog, or *blog, is a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first. Typically, weblogs are published by individuals and their style is personal and informal. Weblogs first appeared in the mid-1990s, becoming popular as simple and free publishing tools became available towards the turn of the century. Since anybody with a net connection can publish their own weblog, there is great variety in the quality, content, and ambition of weblogs, and a weblog may have anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of daily readers.

Examples of the *genre exist on a continuum from *confessional, online *diaries to logs tracking specific topics or activities through links and commentary. Though weblogs are primarily textual, experimentation with sound, *images, and videos has resulted in related genres such as photoblogs, videoblogs, and audioblogs.

Most weblogs use links generously, allowing readers to follow conversations between weblogs by following links between entries on related topics. Readers may start at any point of a weblog, seeing the most recent entry first, or arriving at an older post via a search engine or a link from another site, often another weblog. Once at a weblog, readers can read on in various orders: chronologically, thematically, by following links between entries or by searching for keywords.

Weblogs also generally include a blogroll, which is a list of links to other weblogs the author recommends. Many weblogs allow readers to enter their own comments to individual posts.

Weblogs are serial and cumulative, and readers tend to read small amounts at a time, returning hours, days, or weeks later to read entries written since their last visit. This serial or episodic structure is similar to that found in *epistolary novels or *diaries, but unlike these a weblog is open-ended, finishing only when the writer tires of writing.

Many weblog entries are shaped as brief, independent narratives, and some are explicitly or implicitly fictional, though the standard genre expectation is non-fiction. Some weblogs create a larger frame for the micro-narratives of individual posts by using a consistent rule to constrain their structure or themes, thus, Francis Strand connects his stories of life in Sweden by ending each with a Swedish word and its translation. Other weblogs connect frequent but dissimilar entries by making a larger narrative explicit: Flight Risk is about an heiress’s escape from her family, The Date Project documents a young man’s search for a girlfriend, and Julie Powell narrates her life as she works her way through Julia Child’s cookbook.

Now, I could have just linked you to that extended definition, but to emulate my beginner blogger techniques, I copied and pasted it in.