In Blogging as a Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog (available here), Miller and Shepherd discuss the purposes of blogging for both the reader and writer. Yes, I know this is an article from pretty early on in the term… but bear with me. I will use their research to examine Post Secret (here), Six Word Memoir (here), and Facebook (here… I’m impressed that you need a link for that). I know that we have done considerable work with this in class (and at home, for some of you), but I think this will be a new angle on familiar topics.

Miller and Shepherd turn to James Atlas’ phrase “culture of confession” (link above, middle of page 4) to describe the current climate of American culture– people are sharing more personal things in increasingly public spheres than ever before. Post Secret, Six Word Memoir, and Facebook all exemplify this in their own way. Post Secret is, by its very design, made up of actual confessions. In the words of Post Secret itself: “[y]our secret can be a regret, fear, betrayal, desire, confession or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.” (Source) It is, straight up, confessional. Very few submissions are selected to be posted, most will never be released in any public way. Even with this knowledge, thousands of submissions are sent– there is a deep desire for many people to have their experiences see the light of day, even if that is just through contact with one stranger.

An atypically PG example of a Post-Secret confession

Six Word Memoir is mostly significantly less “juicy” than Post Secret. It is less exclusive– anyone can post, and the only curating that happens is when posts are selected for books or highlighted by the editors. It allows the writer to confess, in a way, but it is from a much more literary/storytelling standpoint. Contributors are supposed to share their life stories or important aspects of their lives, rather than let slip a single illicit detail.

Finally, Facebook– by far the most well known and widely-contributed-to of the three sites. When describing Facebook, it is difficult not to make it sound like an extremely narcissistic endeavor. Though it is less public than Post Secret or Six Word Memoir, its relatively small-scale sharing is more than made up for by the complete lack of anonymity of its users to each other. It is fundamentally a social endeavor– after all, you are sharing posts with your entire community of friends. The personal confessional aspect, though, is loud and strong. This truly exemplifies a “culture of confession”: not only are you choosing to broadcast details of your life to basically everyone you know, but the details themselves are often the most banal minutia of your day. Lunch selection, a single youtube video, a haircut. Where else but a culture that values and demands confessions would such consistent over-sharing be seen as not just acceptable, but standard?

After visiting the Belkin Gallery and participating in the Walk for Reconciliation, I started to think about the importance of decolonization– that is, undoing elitist, damaging colonial ways of thinking in my life. I had intended to write a post about it at the time, but I pushed it aside and eventually got distracted by other things (…midterms…). It wasn’t until I read bell hooks’ “Feminism is for Everybody” for our political science class that I was reminded of its significance.

As bell hooks observes, “[m]ost American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold toward less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally. When unenlightened individual feminist thinkers addressed global issues of gender exploitation and oppression they did and do so from a perspective of neocolonialism” (pages 45-46). I think this critique is relevant beyond examining modern feminist movements– many of us in Western culture often embody colonialist/imperialist values or ideas even as we try to undo and correct injustice. This “perspective of neocolonialism” has created and strengthened systems of oppression world-wide. It is easy, as a privileged person, to unthinkingly fall into the outdated colonial arrogance that has for centuries driven Western countries to conclude that they know what is best for other people. As highly educated students, we must be mindful of how these ideas are still present in the society we live in, and often subconsciously in ourselves.

Hearing about the atrocities of the Residential Schools, and, more recently, reading life narratives documenting the brutality of the United States invasion of Iraq (in Salaam-Pax and Baghdad Burning) made me want to commit to ways of thinking that will seek to prevent these kinds of imperialist horrors from happening again. I don’t think that it is enough to condemn these as the actions of others: I also need to examine how I might embody in my own life the same kinds of colonial values that make tragedies like this possible, and even commonplace. This unlearning will be a continual process of critically examining my thoughts and assumptions, of seeking out points of view that go against dominant Western thought, of interrogating the systems I contribute to and asking how I can change them.

One of the systems with the most impact on my life right now is UBC, fundamentally an academic institution focused on research. This is where I would like to start focusing on decolonizing. Academia is often an insular community, difficult for many to access; the research we produce is probably hard for the general population (and often myself!) to understand fully. I want to go to school (and live, like I do) in a place where all voices are heard and valued. Where the barriers many people face to join the conversation are talked about transparently, and serious efforts are made to tear them down. Where lived experience is valued, and diversity is respected as an essential component of any liberated space.

Our work on summaries has caused a total 180 degree shift in my thinking– in high school, we were taught to move away from summaries or reports. Summary was considered to be an elementary-level work, completed competently by anyone and used only to take up space in a book report. That there could be multiple accurate summaries of a work had never occurred to me, and yet of course a summarizer choses what to focus on. I just hadn’t realized that could be used in an intentional way– I thought that there was one “best” way to summarize each work.

As someone who is quite into in comics and graphic novels (what Gillian Whitlock would have us call “graphic narratives” http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649737 ) I have been incredibly interested in our analysis of Persepolis. I have spent a decent amount of time studying both visual arts and graphic novels, and that knowledge combined with our exploration of summary has helped me to solidify a concept that has been kicking around in my mind for a while. Namely, that art, and specifically comics, are a visual summary of what they are depicting.

This new knowledge of the malleability of summary has made the word “summary” seem all the more accurate to describe comics. As no two people experience, remember, or talk about an event or object the same way, no two people would draw it the same way either. And even one person will probably change their depiction depending on the context and the audience. You’ll tell a story differently if you’re talking to your grandma or your friend, and depending on how you might feel about it that day your retelling might have a completely different tone. The same goes for summary: each artist has their own style, and manipulates that style in order to use to represent the emotions and subject matter that they are portraying. Add onto that each author’s choice of words, layout, and design, and comics become an incredibly effective tool for presenting something to an audience.

Professor Laurie McNeill (if you’re reading this, uh, hi) has described summary in our ASTU class as an “act of remember and forgetting.” The writer chooses what to leave out and what to include– and in the case of abstractions, sometimes what to add. When talking about comics as summary, I would incorporate the idea of exaggeration to these two other acts. Comics aren’t super realistic. Depending on the style, some come closer to reality than others, but in my experience they usually take considerable stylistic liberties. This exaggeration, this “hyper-realism”, is what I think partially makes them such a powerful form of communication. Take charicatures, for example (those goofy, completely over-the-top sketches you can get drawn of yourself at carnivals)– looking at them, one would be hard-pressed to say they look real, and yet you can pretty much always tell who they’re depicting. They are a good visual summary– they don’t include every detail, but they embellish the critical and important features so that the audience knows exactly what to focus on.

A note about linking: I can’t figure out how to link to one specific post of Riverbend’s blog, or even link to a certain date. The best I could get was a month’s worth of archived posts, in this case August of 2008. To access the post I analyzed, click here and scroll down to “My New Talent” (from Thursday, August 21st @ 3:15 pm)– it should be near the bottom of the page. If anyone can figure out how to set this up more effectively, let me know!

First off, I highly recommend reading her original post– it’s powerful, descriptive, and in general very well done. For those of you who won’t, though, I will try to summarize (because apparently I haven’t done enough already…). In one of her first posts, Riverbend narrates the course of one sleepless night, and captures along the way how the U.S. Invasion has changed Iraq and Iraqis. I was struck by how well this post managed to convey the messy and very real, everyday consequences of the Iraq War. While reading, she manages to make the events she experiences feel as real as my own life. Riverbend accomplishes this through her combined use of easily-identifiable (to a Western audience) anecdotes and vignettes of violence or despair that are quite far from many (I’m assuming) of our ranges of experience.

She begins: “Suffering a bout of insomnia last night, I found myself in front of the television, channel-surfing.” I have done this myself, countless times, and as I read I picture specific times that it has happened to me… drawing dangerously close to the “they’re just like me!” fallacy that Whitlock described in Soft Weapons. Riverbend continues “Promptly at 2 am, the electricity went off and I was plunged into the pitch black…” Suddenly, quite different from what I am used to, but Riverbend is unfazed: this is a common occurrence in her life. I can easily identify with the first line, as it is part of my grounded reality. The proximity of the unfamiliar parts to the familiar ones makes it impossible for me to exclude the power outage from a grounded, “real” reality.

Riverbend goes on to describe the heat that night as “so hot, it feels like you are cooking gently inside of an oven.” Hyperbole, complaining about the weather: what’s more familiar to us than that? A few lines down: “The silence was shattered a few moments later by the sound of bullets in the distance. It was just loud enough to get your attention, but too far away to be a source of any real anxiety.” The sounds of bullets is, to me, a source of anxiety for sure– regardless of how far away they are. Again, she pairs relatable narrative with intense, unfamiliar, violent detail. I am forced to respect the Occupation as a concrete occurrence rather than a concept. In addition, I am turned away from the urge to put Riverbend and myself in exactly the same category: though we have some similar experiences, her life is fundamentally different than my own.

By placing easily-identified-with anecdotes, e.g. “stubbing my toe on the last step, (which wasn’t supposed to be there)” that will be very real to many Western audiences (because they are often part of our lived experience) next to sensory details about the violence and heartbreaking nature of the U.S. Invasion of Iraq, Riverbend forces the reader to see the Iraq war as equally real, physical and contemporary as Western everyday life. At first glance, the two kinds of anecdotes appear to be juxtaposed, but in fact they are both equally real parts of her life that happen synchronically.