I must confess it felt a bit surreal to read a journal article detailing the life and times of a blog about Project Runway, especially since I had printed the article out and was reading it in traditional paper form. That said, I’ve set aside my paper, and it seems rather apt that I’m now about to post my thoughts about “Blogging as Participation” on our class blog.
Thought 1: disproportionately burning bright
Lankshear and Knobel state that “a tiny proportion of the vast number of blogs that exist account for a large proportion of the inbound links.”(4). There is no denying this, and there is no denying that the more popular something on the internet gets, the faster its popularity rises. When it comes to memes, we tend to burn them out rather than let them fade away. In other words, this disproportionate distribution of views towards a small amount of very popular websites is an obvious reality, but it is also a reality that what’s popular on the Internet changes very quickly. Honestly, does anybody even use MySpace anymore? And is Friendster still a thing?
Thought 2: from yolo to actually just living
Shifting gears a bit, I’d like to touch on the nature of participation in the digital realm and how it translates into real life applications. After reading a couple of other blog posts on this article by classmates, I found myself thinking about the examples of blogging participation given in the article. When I ran a literature circles unit during my practicum, I included a blogging component in which students posted reviews of their books online and commented on each other’s posts. Part of my focus in these online literature circles was to make a more explicit connection between the social and academic skills students were using in their face-to-face discussions versus their digital ones. I wanted students to participate in their discussions online in the same manner in which they would participate in them in a physical classroom setting. While it turned out that respectful communication wasn’t an issue online, meaningful communication was. Students needed extra prodding to move beyond “yolo” and “nice post” to actually engaging in one another’s thoughts and having a back-and-forth digital discourse.
Thought 3: Particip-Action
Oftentimes, social media movements for change are criticized for being lazy and ineffective (i.e. “like this picture to end poverty!!!”). However, social and digital media are actually very valuable and effective tools for enacting social change – the most commonly cited recent example being the use of social media during the Arab Spring in spreading news about current events and plans for protests. There’s also the example of Kony 2012… but we won’t wade into that mire this far into a blog post. A more successful example would be the growing popularity of microfinancing non-profits like Kiva, which uses digital and social media to crowd-source a very large number of very small loans in order to help people maintain or start a business. At the core of these organizations is the idea that a little bit of help by a lot of different people can, ultimately, help to make lasting and sustainable social and economic change. And social media can be a powerful tool for doing just that.
Works Cited
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. ”Blogging as Participation: The Active Sociality of a New Literacy.” American Educational Research Association. San Francisco, CA. April 11, 2006. Web.
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– Allison
Blog post #3
1 response so far ↓
ehayman // Jul 14th 2013 at 10:13 pm
While your entire blog post is awesome Allison (love the yolo) I think that your “Thought 3: Particip-Action” is really interesting, and not something that I really thought much about when reading the Lankshear & Knobel text.
So often, people role their eyes when Twitter (for example) is brought into conversations. Admittedly, I used to be one of those people. The idea of FOLLOWING people is weird to me, I don’t like the character limit, and I really didn’t understand the point of the hashtag (#hashtagsareweird), but after working in an office in which social media was my responsibility, I stated to kind of like the whole Twitter thing, and mainly due to the point you raise, social action. There are so many people in the world who are doing amazing things; locally, nationally, and across the world, and what a blessing it is to be able to be connected to all these inspirations. After leaving that job, I found I was missing the Twitter feed. I wasn’t missing contributing to it, no, I missed the feed itself. I missed having my own, curated newspaper with fresh updates every time I needed it. I found myself created an account (that I never post from, but check daily-ish) just so I could follow all different foundations, non-for-profits, musicians, artists, and newspapers that mattered to me. I think you are completely right that “social and digital media are actually very valuable and effective tools for enacting social change”. I think that comes with the connectedness that the Internet provides. It provides opportunities for collaboration and a space for people to come together and learn about others and work toward making the world a better place. While something like Twitter is not always used to this type of action, it can be, and that type of participation in the global community is most definitely a start, and something that students can benefit greatly from being exposed to.
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