BlogRhet

Worried about privacy?

2008-07-09T11:47:00.000-07:00

Have you ever been freaked out when a casual acquaintance from ‘real life’ found your blog? Or when your Sitemeter showed a steady stream of Google pervs visiting your site? Do you wonder about whether to put up photos of your children or your friends on your blog, for fear of your privacy? Many of us have experienced these unsettling moments, and questioned or even changed our writing styles and our habits as a result.

What strategies do you use to reach the audience you want, while maintaining your own privacy? Most bloggers use some kind of anonymization or privacy strategy, a ‘screen name’ being the most simple and obvious.

Mommy-blogger and researcher Aimée Morrison (Department of English, University of Waterloo, Canada) is conducting a study of writing strategies to protect privacy. She has set up a voluntary, anonymous 15- to 20-minute survey at http://english.uwaterloo.ca/~ahm/ that asks questions about such strategies, for example, if you use password protection to limit your writing’s audience. Follow the link to learn more about the study, or to participate. You can also contact Prof. Morrison directly at ahm [at] uwaterloo [dot] ca for more information.

Aimée is going to BlogHer in San Francisco, and she’d love to interview you in person if you’re going—send her an email at the address above.

Please feel free to repost this message, unchanged, to your blog to encourage others to participate too.
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This study has been reviewed by, and received ethics clearance  through, the Office of Research Ethics, University of Waterloo.

The Moving Finger....

2008-05-15T09:09:00.000-07:00

When Hillary Clinton made her gaffe about running the gauntlet of fire in Kosovo, there was a lot of editorial comment in the press about memory and how a person edits it. I got interested in the discussion and went and did some research, culminating in reading a book called White Gloves, How We Create Ourselves Through Memory, by John Kotre. This book turned out to be a bit off the topic I was looking for, but is a marvelous read for anyone who doesn't have basic psychology training but is interested in how memory works to form character in young children.

And so I started thinking about memory forming my character and that of my daughters. And how I edit memory myself. The premise of the book is that we form memory in different ways at different ages, and that memory is stored and accessed in layers. One of the major things we do is to stretch memory to cover more than the original event – leading to, for instance, a clear memory that it was always sunny in the summer at the cottage. Or the conviction that your sister always got the first chance at something and you got second. These convictions shape your perception of reality as an adult – causing extra misery if your week of vacation is rainy or colouring your reaction to your sister's success. It is possible, according to Kotre to deconstruct these memories and influence how you react to things, although he is very sceptical about accessing childhood memories (regressing, I think is the term, but I took the book back to the library).

A lot of our childhood memories are, in fact, not ours but are picked up from the adults around us and incorporated as if they were real. We tell our children stories about themselves and they internalize these stories. Or, at least, my family did it that way. My grandmother and my mother told me stories about myself as a baby or a two year old or whatever. I can identify some of these stories as dramatizations when I think about them. Or at least as edited versions of an event that was probably a lot more shapeless when it took place. As an example, my mother would tell, repeatedly, a story about taking me to the House of Commons public gallery at the age of three and being embarrassed by my saying in clear and ringing tones 'there's the man who wore Daddy's pants' about an MP who was my father's friend, causing all the MP's to look up at the gallery. This story was supposed to illustrate my precocious command of clear speech and, I suppose, that I was an extroverted toddler. The tale has become part of my mental furniture. I have no clue how it really happened, but I think of myself as having been a confident and extroverted child.

I think we all do this to our children to some extent. My grandmother relied on her memory; my mother did much the same. When I do what my daughters call 'telling baby stories' I tend to pull out photograph albums to illustrate things, or I tell stories from the photographs. Because although my grandmother and my mother did have photographs, they were far fewer and mostly static poses. I have maybe half a dozen images of my mother as a little girl. I have more of myself in my first three years because my father was in the navy during WWII and the family sent him photographs; it was much more expensive, relatively, to take and develop photos in the '40's and '50's. Even in the '60's, colour photographs were an item that most people had to budget for. Today's disposable cameras and $.19 prints amaze me; even more astounding is the digital photograph revolution, making still and live photography available in quantity immediately. And so, where my mother relied on her memory, my daughter will have not only still photography but also video to discuss with her daughter.

And there is the mommy blog. Unless your mother kept a diary or a baby book, your stories, like mine, rely on the spoken word backed up with still photographs or even the occasional grainy 'home movie'. Mommy bloggers' children will have the stories preserved, in their original form, backed with copious illustrations in living and sometimes moving colour, put together as the event unfolded. You will probably still retell seminal stories to your children. But your blog will be there to give them a different look, a time frozen reference, to these stories. And to the woman who was telling them.

I wonder a lot about how that will unfold. I picture my granddaughter remembering, say, planting flowers with grama. And there will be the story, with photographs of her in her bug shirt lining up the plant pots. Not raw data, certainly. All of us necessarily edit the stories as we tell them, shaping them to fit the time and space we have to get the story down, emphasizing the point we want to make about what happened. Even bits of dialogue get edited for coherency or chosen to fit into the thought thread as it is spun out onto the page.

I wonder, as I write this, how my mother would have blogged about her day at the House of Commons with her daughter. Or how she felt about raising a child alone when her husband was out sailing around in a corvette in the North Atlantic, in constant danger. I have these stories as she told them recollected in tranquility and, I am sure, smoothed into a pleasing shape by time and repetition. I know that the stories I tell to my daughters are, in fact, partly constructions formed by time and retelling. The stories about my granddaughter, on the other hand, are immediate, although shaped. I almost wish I could live long enough to understand if there will be an appreciable difference.

I won't. When Little Stuff is, say, forty, I would be 101. I'm not hoping to be that old; don't much want to be, tell the truth. And so I write this blog, a message sent forward into the future with hope and love, and try my best to make it a true record, even though I know it can't be perfect, of who I am, what I think, and how we were together.

Crossposted from Them's My Sentiments

Help An Academi-Mom

2008-03-04T15:38:00.001-08:00

Are you a mom? Do you blog?

I am a mom trying to finish my PhD; and I need YOUR help!

I am conducting academic research FOR you and ABOUT you. I have a particular interest in studying those things that make the transition to motherhood easier, or at the very least, better understood. The growing number of “Mommy Bloggers” has piqued my interest and I am researching the experience of blogging for mothers of young children. Your help would be greatly appreciated and go a long way toward increasing the knowledge of the ways in which blogging can be meaningful for people like mothers.

Please complete my survey and let me know about your blogging experience.

Please click HERE to learn more, or simply click the web button that you see below.

I know your time is valuable, thank you so much for participating.

Are They Reinventing Motherhood (or just giving us a sneak peak into previously private journals)?

2008-02-16T05:32:00.000-08:00

Guest Post by Ron of R-World (cross-posted at R-World)

Kids? It’s like living with homeless people. They’re cute but they can just chase you around all day long going, “Can I have dollar? I’m missing a shoe! I need a ride!”

- Kathleen Madigan

Motherhood is a confusing performance, like painting for the legally blind, the preoccupied audience of husband and children caught up in their own drama or anomie and chronically unaware of the great effort expended on their behalf.

While philosophers love the idea of humanity, it is mothers who navigate the real mess of it, the humanity of little people who leave in their wake lost shoes and scuffed walls. A woman whose charm, beauty, and intelligence has given her a variety of romantic options suddenly finds herself confined to home with a big-headed creature who, if he could talk, would go on at length about the flavor of the couch.

And about this game of romance. In what other arena does success require one to immediately retire? Imagine Tiger Woods forced to the side lines after winning his first master’s tournament, victory forcing him into retirement, and you get some sense of how disorienting it is for a woman have finally navigated the mine field of love to learn that this part of life is over; from now on, odd and beguiling children are likely to be the sole beneficiaries of their charms.

But in their blogs, these smart mothers may be creating a new kind of motherhood – at the very least they are finally performing before an appreciative audience of other mothers who “get” what they are doing.

While the act of mothering may be basically the same, its context has been transformed in the last few decades. Mothers no longer sit in a web of extended family that play the role of easily available baby sitters and reference points, people who can sit watch against the attacks of insanity. Mothers are often raising children hundreds or thousands of miles away from their own mothers and sisters. Churches are less likely to provide a default community. University education and an excess of reading has created an ideological divide between them and their own family, even if they did live close by, a divide that makes sharing parenting problems and tips awkward at best. Probably at no time have mothers been more isolated, less able to depend on those around them.

Blogging mothers have done two things: they’ve created a network for themselves and they’ve given the rest of us front row seats into a performance that would have otherwise been completely missed. We get the jokes that would have sailed over the heads of their children, the expressions of serious frustrations that preoccupied husbands dismiss as petty, and the profound insights that would have been forgotten by the time they finally got a coffee break with friends, unable to remember what they were so eager to say now that they are forced to socialize distracted by the peripheral parenting that characterizes almost every activity at a particular stage of life.

It might just be that historians and sociologists will eventually conclude that the blogging mothers have created a new kind of motherhood. Meanwhile, the rest of us are beneficiaries of their willingness – perhaps even their eagerness – to perform, at last, before an audience that can’t help but applaud.

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If you are looking for examples of this blog genre, here are four I’ve come to enjoy. (And to be clear, these women are mother bloggers in the same way that Bruce Jenner was a javelin-throwing athlete. It is a big part of who they are, but it is by no means all that they write about or all that they are.) All of these women show a lack of pretense, a sort of unfeigned modesty uncalled for when one can write so smartly and with such humor. Theirs has been a reminder to this idea junkie that behind abstract terms like humanity lie real people with runny noses and definite ideas about appropriate wardrobe and menu selections even at the ripe old age of 7.

Kyran Pittman pushes at the boundary of blogging, waffling between writing about the daily drama and at times actually transcending the genre with postings that seem to fall somewhere between short stories and vignettes. She is probably helping to pioneer a new form of literature.

Slouching Mother peels back the wrapper on motherhood in a way that is strangely honest without insistence on showing the scabs. Her stories are at turns provocative and warming, and she makes motherhood seem as beautiful and at times pathological as it must be, and is one of Kyran's fellow pioneers in the creation of a new literary form that might just get studied alongside the short story and novel in a few years.

Chesca has an unfair advantage over other bloggers because she not only writes with self deprecating humor, but could model – and often does for the benefit of her blog reading audience who get to pretend that they are in her living room as they leaf through the family photo album and listen to her whimsical and witty reports that she closes with unpredictable punch lines just often enough to keep readers off balance.

Cce’s brilliant writing is balanced by her rather quaint reading– she comes here most days. (Hello CCE.) Our exchange of comments has become for me a bit like mid-morning tea in which each of us gets to share what’s animated our thoughts and be heard and acknowledged before moving on with our day. I, for one, take comfort in sharing sensibilities with a woman this smart and talented, even if our lives are playing out in opposite corners of the country, in very different phases. And someday I plan to tell people that I was among the first to realize her potential.

For me, these mother bloggers do so much more than entertain. The rest of us get to be beneficiaries of expressions of charm that might have been muttered into the clothing hamper and lost in an earlier time. And I am at a stage of life when I get a little better sense of my own wife’s incredible performance of transforming sofa chewers into university students (sadly, about a decade or two after such awareness might have been of comfort). [And yes, that's my wife and children from about 14 years ago in the above picture. It would be fascinating to be able to read Sandi's blog from that time.]

Writing, Blogging and Criticism.

2008-02-04T07:50:00.000-08:00

When I was ten, my English teacher told me, “You have a gift. Make sure you use it. I fully expect to walk into a bookstore one day and see your name on a novel.” It’s been many years and the path of my life has taken me many different ways, but I’ve never really forgotten what she said.

Heading into college, I wondered if I could make a decent living as a writer, and decided to pursue my other passion, biology, with the intention of going to vet school. I received my biology degree, changed my mind about vet school and after two and a half years as a biologist at NIH, decided that while science in the classroom is fun, science in the lab is boring. For the past three years, I’ve been a stay-home mom and part-time vet tech, occupations which have given me plenty to write about.

Almost a year ago, a friend urged me to start a blog, which I did mainly to keep out of town relatives up to date on my kids. As it turned out, I love blogging and have yet to run out of things to talk about. It’s awakened that desire to be a professional writer. I think I’ve got the chops for it, and given some help with navigating the industry, I’m confident that I could eventually be successful.

Then someone anonymously left an unkind comment on one of my posts and I learned something about myself. I’m not that concerned about the opinion of someone who doesn’t have the guts to leave their name, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it stung a little. When you’re good at something, it’s natural to want other people to think you’re good at it too. Reminders that not everyone will agree with you can be hard to swallow. Before I can make my way as a writer, I need to develop a thicker skin, because criticism is as inevitable as the day is long.

Over the summer, a columnist in my hometown wrote a piece about pitbull bans and I strongly disagreed with him. We exchanged a few emails on the subject, but I tried to make it clear that while I thought he was wrong, I respected his perspective. When I looked up the column online, I was shocked to see some of the hateful comments readers had left behind. I wonder if the author reads the comments on the site, and if he does, how he deals with them.

After that, I happened upon the blog of one of my favorite authors, Tess Gerritsen, who has twenty novels to her name. When you read her blog, you can feel her anxiety about book reviews and sales, about success and failure, and it struck me that even a seasoned author like Gerritsen is prone to the same misgivings as the rest of us.

I think the Internet makes it easier to be cruel or hateful because of the impersonal nature of cyberspace. I read things online all the time that I hope people would never say to another person’s face. It’s easier to be mean when you don’t have to look someone in the eye or worry about bumping into them at the grocery store. So I also believe a writer needs to consider the source when taking criticism over the Internet. The author who supported pitbull bans is not a horrible, dog hating person, and the people who left angry comments are probably not violent or antisocial, they’re probably just animal lovers who feel strongly about the subject and who reacted emotionally after reading the column.

In addition, a writer needs to decide how to handle comments that turn ugly. A difference in opinion is one thing; nasty accusations that lend nothing to the conversation are, in my opinion, better off being deleted.

I dismissed the comment on my blog because I’m smart enough to know that not everyone will agree with me, and I’m not egotistical enough to believe that my opinion is the only one out there or that I am always right. For me, my goal is to not take criticism personally, but to use it as a tool to make myself a better writer, to expand my readership, to reach out to a different audience through words.

**Crossposted at The Great Walls Of Baltimore

Seeking out my own corner in the domestic jungle jumble

2008-01-31T07:05:00.000-08:00

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

Virginia Woolf

The above quote has become somewhat of a cliche. In fact, I've seen it trounced about in the papers twice in the past two weeks on various different subjects. Just exchange "fiction" to anything from "scrapbooking" to "studying" to "sewing" to whatever, it's an undeniably contextually mouldable idea. In a perfect world.

Women tend to drag it out at times of flux or transition; as if they need to quantify their changeability, if such excuses were necessary (as they often tend to be). However it is a somewhat tired rubric, I think, now.

Still, I find myself at a loss to come up with an original caption to describe the following:

Yes, this is what counts as my own piece of space in our ever-claustrophobic household. Last week, over a two-day period, I turfed clothing, re-located Christmas ornaments and lonely, unused luggage to the garage; I manoeuvred furniture without causing bodily harm to either myself or my children. I did it all with the prayer in my mind, "Please let the table fit. Please let me have this place where I can shut the door."

As you can see, I've set it up with all my blogging/ writing accoutrements. It's not what I'd call an office; it's not much of what I'd call anything, really.

But it's mine and who knows what may be achieved in here. Oh, the dreams I can dream; magic made tangible from the ether of mothballs and the remnants of boot-polish and dry-cleaning chemicals.

Or I could just get high off them.

That could be good too.

*Please, just on a writerly note, I am fully aware of how many compound adjectives I used in this post. Just so you know, and you know I know.

Cross posted at MiscMum

Googlereaderphobia

2007-12-09T11:23:00.000-08:00

Googlereaderphobia* (from the Greek φόβος "Phobos," meaning fear) is defined as an irrational, persistent, and intense fear of checking Google Reader. This fear motivates the avoidance of Reader. When avoidance is not possible, intense anxiety results. Such anxiety increases as a function of the number of posts labeled "new" or "unread"; if this number equals or exceeds 100, efforts to avoid Reader may become frantic and cause significant impairment in one's social and occupational functioning.

Anxiety may be relieved, albeit temporarily, by marking unread posts as read, although this behavior is recognized by the sufferer as illogical and dysfunctional. A small but substantial group (on the order of 15 percent) of patients reports paranoid ideation to the effect that on the rare occasion that there are no posts remaining to be read, a new post pops up within seconds. This same group tends to view Google Reader as a malevolent entity, with startlingly and recognizably human features.

The only known treatment is the total disabling of one's feed aggregator(s).

*also known as Bloglinesphobia or feedreaderphobia, although these appellations are used less frequently.

The Power of One

2007-11-12T15:39:00.000-08:00

Crossposted at Them's My Sentiments

In early October I had an unfortunate experience at a local branch of Danier Leather. In the course of a blog post mainly about agism I described this incident, and in the Comments to the post several readers advised that I should write to the company to complain. This seemed like a good idea and so I wrote a letter to the local store and one to the president of the company (always go to the top). My commenters had asked me to let them know what was happening and I therefore posted a copy of the letter to the president as a follow up.

The next morning I had an email in my inbox from the Call Centre Operations manager; it seems that the company does a frequent search of the Web for mentions of its name and that of its president (which is why I am not naming him here). The email apologised for the incident, assured me that there would be follow-up and asked that I call the writer. When I did, we had a good conversation about what I had written and why, I apologised for posting the letter before snailmailing it and I was offered a gift as an apology.

All very nice. What really intrigued me, however, was the speed of the response and the fact that the company was trolling the internet for references to its name. Some of my comment writers had included incidents of their own in which they had complained about service, with varying results. But I defy anyone to cite a faster response than the one I have just described.

All of which is a preface to the main theme of this post, which is the power of using the internet. It never occurred to me that the Danier Leather people would pick up a reference to themselves in a blog. Search engines are amazing tools. I know that some of you have visit counters of more or less sophistication, some of which track what search words were used to get the visitor to your site, some of which track where the visitor comes from, and much more. I just have a simple hit counter but I am contemplating an upgrade now. And so that is Question Number One -- do you have a sophisticated counter and if so, what does it tell you about your visitors and how do you make use of the information?

Question Number Two is this -- have you written a complaint about any company by name (as opposed to writing to the company) and if you have, what kind of response did you get? As I said earlier, I was absolutely amazed by the speed with which my complaint was picked up. As well, I was impressed with how seriously they took it. It makes me wonder if other big companies are internet savvy and have a protocol for responding to mentions of them. And if so, what kind of companies they are. Danier is a provider of luxury goods; would this make them more complaints sensitive than someone like Sears or Walmart?

Third and last, I find myself thinking hard about how this power could be harnessed and used to address some of the issues that BlogRhet contributors are concerned with. Things like lack of sensitivity in advertising or child unfriendly retail outlets (I know of a coffee shop that did not have a baby changing table in the washroom, for goodness sake) or staff. Things like lack of respect (basic good manners!) for the poor slobs who are spending the money. Julie Pippert did a good post on that one on her home site. I, for one, am completely sick of grocery checkout staff who chat with a co-worker while scanning and bagging my purchases. The local grocery where I shop has a complaints station and posts the complaint, plus answer, on the wall at the front of the store. There's no such facility in most of the big chains. But there is the internet, hmm?

If this kind of thing interests you, could you give some thought to the questions. If you have done post(s) about similar things, could you drop off a link, please. I'd really like to hear your ideas and if I get some good ones, do a follow up post on the topic.

Thanks!

Mary G

A Writer Laments

2007-10-18T19:23:00.000-07:00

I published this in my blog earlier this week - I've been trying to identify and articulate my feelings on my desire to make a living as a writer and how blogging does or doesn't help my larger goals. This post is a starting point. I suspect I'll explore this more in the future.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about my ultimate goal of making a living as a writer. I know I'm not the only woman out there who created a blog as a way to work on her writing and find her voice and all that stuff. And I also know that many bloggers are lucky in that they get to make a living from their blogs or various blog-related gigs.

But I've been thinking about this whole blogging thing, and I'm wondering what role it plays in my big picture (how it helps me achieve my bigger goals), and also how much it has or hasn't done for me as a writer.

I didn't get into blogging to make a living from it. Given that I've been *blogging* in one way or another since 2000, when the whole concept wasn't anything like what it is today, it's always been about the writing and community for me. But in reinventing myself as a non-anonymous, *real* blogger, I've been both lucky and surprised with the opportunities that have come my way. I've considered it an unexpected fringe benefit.

The thing is, when I think of myself as a writer, I think of books. I think of all the essays and poems I've written, all the stories (on paper, in the computer, in my head - started, finished, dropped half-way through) that I want to put together into real, actual books. Books that people would read and enjoy. When I say "I want to make a living as a writer", this is what I mean: I want to be a published author in the traditional sense.

And sure, I think the Internet offers so many opportunities and alternatives (hell, I started writing like this with the sole hope of finding and cultivating an audience without having to rely on publishers who don't have time or interest for a nobody like me); and I want to reap whatever benefits I can from blogging and whatever connections I make through here, but. But. But.

The Internet is also such a wasteland of crap. It is littered with bogus opportunities and dead dreams. And I worry sometimes that I will end up being Tere the Failed Writer because I never figured out the right way to do this.

My main beef with using the Internet to further your writing career is that - based on the very extensive research I've done - people expect amazing writing for shitty pay. I've lost count of all the "job opportunities" I've seen where the demand is excellent writing and editing, creativity and quick-turnaround, and they want it all for... $20 or so.

Are you effing kidding me? It's like everyone wants brilliance to help sell their products, to generate attention, to build a business, to promote, to inform - but no one wants to pay for it. And yet, you're supposed to somehow make a living from taking 10 hours to create a masterpiece and getting a whopping $15 for it.

Another source of frustration is all these websites that promise "valuable information", "funding sources" or any other such seemingly important thing - and all you get is a bunch of crap. Dead ends. Obscure info. Bait and switch. Really, nothing very different than what the Internet offers in every area of life.

It's not that I expect people to pay loads of money for a few articles or something; it's that no one (except writers) factors in one important aspect of producing good work: time. Those perfect piles of words people want take time (to research, to interview people, to put it all together). And when you divide that amount of time by the precious $20, you're basically making $2 an hour. Which, please. In the real world I inhabit, this is ridiculous.

These thoughts are present in my mind because I really want to get somewhere as a writer. And by getting somewhere, I mean that I want one of two things: to find an agent and/or publisher I can work with, or to not have to have a job so I can really put my mind and focus into my writing.

Oh, wishful thinking, I know. Everyone else in my boat wants the same thing. I'm much too small a fish in an enormous pond. And every other appropriate cliche.

Still, it's what I want. I don't want status quo and I don't want to settle. I want to fight for my dreams. I want to make those dreams real.

The psychoanalytic implications of blogging

2007-10-11T13:30:00.000-07:00

Psychoanalysis? That’s something to do with Freud, isn’t it? Yes, it is, yet to talk about Freud in the 21st century is almost to invite conjecture and doubt, especially when we specifically referring to Literature and creativity. This is because in its early years, psychoanalysis did suffer from over-applied textual analyses.
Huh?

Well historically, if a text contained imagery or description of guns or statues then the assumption was sometimes made that it had some sort of phallic significance. A fertile glade or subterranean hideaway was, therefore, a vaginal reference. A fountain that spurted water was….well, you get the idea. Fortunately, psychoanalytic theory has come a long way. Now, it is generally held that psychoanalytic theory attempts to comprehend the "relations between practice and commentary"*, and because thought, writing, dreaming, wonder, delight, creativity etc spring both from the conscious and the unconscious, you can see why a bit of couch-session-ing mightn't be such a bad idea.

What has any of this to do with blogging?

Since its beginnings, psychoanalysis has suffered from its oftentimes conflicting dynamics. So has blogging. Both have attempted to answer any or all of the following questions: Who am I? Why do I write? Because I do write, does that make me an Author? What is an Author? Does an Author require an audience? Why have I chosen this particular medium of expression? How will it be interpreted? Perhaps most important: How can the language which I have acquired possibly convey all that I wish it should, when language, in the first place, is an arbitrary, 'man-made' construct.

I could go on…

Because psychoanalysis is so often also identified with Science (as Science); and because Science is so often polarised to Art; then perhaps it’s not so hard to see why they have such an uneasy relationship. The same can be said for blogging. Consider this —blogging could be seen as slightly incongruous. What once might be saved for the private diary, or art portfolio, or photo album, or galley proofs of a book can now be found in the logical world of Binary and silicon.

But online or offline, there is one commonality: the narrative.

How one interprets narrative – whether it be their own or someone else’s – is, of course, completely individualistic. That might seem like an obvious statement, but before the work of post-structuralist’s like Julia Kristeva and Jacques Lacan dominant ideologies (Psychoanalysis included) suffered from a kind of overt formalism that homogenised readings and conclusions of a text – whether it be a book, or a blog.

My main point here today was to explicate a bit on the historical background of psychoanalysis, and to show how our pedagogical alliances may help – or hurt – how we go about our daily writing and reading.

Note: I realise I haven’t really even gone into what psychoanalysis is or given basic examples of its practice, but first I just wanted to write that little introduction, just to (if I'm being honest) ease my way back into some sort of familiarity with a subject I am a little rusty on, although I devoted a chunk of my life to it for a while. If you like it, I’ll continue it in another post at a later point. Feedback is appreciated!

*Brophy, K (1998) Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing. MUP: Melbourne.

Cross posted at Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum

Back To Basics

2007-10-08T12:12:00.000-07:00

If you really want to put the zap on your blogging mojo, you should rush out and read The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by Andrew Keen.

I was cleaning the bathrooms and listening to our local public radio station (very, very glamorous, no?), when Keen was on air discussing how blogging is going to destroy the world.

The glut of unprofessional (his word, not mine) writing, journalism and criticism out in the blogosphere is slowly chipping away at the centralized "cultures" of the western world.

He cites very specific statistics about the number of blogs being created each minute - an impossibly large and daunting number - and how this cacophony makes it impossible for us, as cultural and media consumers, to make informed decisions about our consumption of literature, film, radio, television, news and every other aspect of the cultural spectrum.

Keen's theory is that we are reducing the people who once were the arbiters of our cultural world to pink slips, with trained critics, authors, filmmakers and newsroom employees being laid off in droves while we "monkeys with a million typewriters" bang out a bunch of crap.

I take issue with some of what Keen theorizes, and I haven't yet finished the book. And ironically, for someone who makes a strong case that blogging causes a cultural apocalypse, Keen seems to have no problem hyping his tome on - you guessed it - his Typepad blog.

However, in some ways, I can see his point.

It takes time, he says, to weed through the gazillion blogs out there and find the ones you want to read, the ones that are of value to you. Time is our most precious commodity, and where once we were able to find our information in specific, expected areas of media, now we are sometimes lost in the vast digital forest.

Yup.

I can buy that.

And I, my friends, am one of those trees obstructing your view.

I got this cool template and I put ads on my site and - I can admit it here, among friends - I got awfully cocky.

I started writing for you.

I began to assume what you wanted to read. How you wanted to be directed. What you wanted to think.

Shame on me.

I am trained in this profession, that is a fact, and so Keen cannot really accuse me of being an amateur.

I am a paid professional in the world of letters, and I earned that privilege through an arduous, costly education and a tremendous amount of personal effort and hard work.

But you don't pay me.

You come here voluntarily. You are a community, not a commodity.

I apologize for mistaking the two.

Making deliberate editorial decisions about what I will or will not write about is not appropriate for this forum. You are not looking for an expert - and I think we can all agree that I offere no parenting and/or life expertise.

Traffic is nice, sure. The small profit I see from the ads in my sidebar is helpful, and does not go unnoticed in my checking account. After all, both my husband and I are, essentially, unemployed.

But that is not why I started writing Chicken And Cheese.

So I will henceforth be writing here as I used to write over here - as if no one was reading.

As if I were writing for myself.

I hope you still want to come along with me.

Truth and Lies in Blogging

2007-09-28T06:25:00.000-07:00

Two powerhouse (by which I mean always interesting and always eloquent) bloggers, Veronica Mitchell of Toddled Dredge and Bub and Pie, recently addressed the role and relativity of truth in blogging. Read on for both posts, and weigh in, let us know what truth means to you...how you read truth in other blogs, and the level of believability, the extension of trust (or gullibility) as you perceive it.

Veronica Mitchell of Toddled Dredge wrote Truth and Blogging:

Penelope Trunk claims that it doesn’t matter if journalists misquote everyone.

The reason that everyone thinks journalists misquote them is that the person who is writing is the one who gets to tell the story. No two people tell the same story… Journalists who think they are telling “the truth” don’t understand the truth. We each have our own truth.

Now this is not a new idea, but I have not seen it asserted so baldly with regard to journalism. If it were true, it would dramatically change the nature (or at least the ideals) of reporting.

I suspect, though, that it is less a carefully reasoned viewpoint than a hastily constructed defense of Trunk’s own character flaws. She need not take care to be honest in how she represents other people, because she cannot be dishonest - everything she says is her own “truth.”

I thought about this recently when I read one of Leslie Bennetts’ posts at The Huffington Post. Bennetts wrote a book published this year called The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? You can read a review of her book at the New Yorker. I am not primarily concerned with her book here, but in her post about her book’s reception.

Bennetts, who thinks no women should stay home with their children, claimed that stay-at-home mommybloggers panned her book without reading it. She does not link to any such bloggers, but she provides several unattributed quotes as evidence that SAHMs were refusing to read her book without giving it a chance.

Google is a wonderful thing. A couple of searches on the quotes she provided were enough to find the cruel mommyblogger who was panning her book without reading it.

Only it turns out she wasn’t. The quotes come from KJ’s blog Raising Devils, where she writes about receiving an email about the book’s (then) future release, and how, despite her suspicions that some of it would be frustrating to her, she planned to read it anyway.

You can compare the Raising Devils post to Leslie Bennetts’ use of it. What do you think? Did Bennetts honestly represent what KJ was saying?

When Antique Mommy and I met for our baby-interrupted lunch, we talked about some of you. In between cries, we talked about bloggers we read and why, and bloggers we don’t read and why not.

Although AM and I are Christians (or maybe because of it), we each have a favorite atheist blogger. We both agreed that the ability to read the personal thoughts and experiences of someone with such different beliefs from our own feels like a great privilege. Blogging gives us a chance to know people on a level that we might not be allowed in person. The walls don’t go up so quickly. Small talk does not first weed out to whom we will reveal our true selves. The strange, instant intimacy of blogging gives us the opportunity to understand how other people see themselves and the world in a way that casual conversation does not.

But this only works if bloggers are honest about themselves (or as honest as sensible privacy concerns allow), and the community blogging has the potential to create only happens if we are honest about each other. We have not really understood someone until we can describe their thoughts or beliefs or actions in a way they recognize as themselves.

I usually shy away from this here. I try not to tell other people’s stories. But when I sum up someone else’s blog - or any other part of the person - I try to do it fairly, not least because I hope they will do the same for me.

Bub and Pie picked up the baton and ran with it in her Lies, Damned Lies, and Blog Posts:

What is the nature of truth in blogging?

(Veronica Mitchell threw down the gauntlet in her recent post on Truth and Blogging: Here’s my response, which outran comment length by a mile.)

For starters, truth in blogging has very little to do with factual accuracy. If I publish a post a few days after I write it, I may or may not bother to search out all uses of the word “today” and replace them with “two days ago.” Reported conversations are rarely complete, and the omissions may or may not be signaled with ellipses. Anecdotes are replete with alterations made for the sake of brevity: two separate events may be telescoped into one; three or more bit players may be merged into a single person. Personally, I avoid these kinds of inaccuracies whenever I can (I’m a bit nitpicky that way), but when I have to choose between deceiving my readers and boring them, I’ll usually opt for the former.

Bloggers also take on no obligation to be impartial. My representation of Dr. WRE last week was anything but impartial (and I rather depended upon Mr. B&P to show up and point that out). Perhaps an impartial way of characterizing the psychiatrist’s behaviour would be to say, “He wasn’t trying to humiliate me, but he couldn’t have done a better job if he had tried.” (Or maybe not – I’m still not quite impartial about that yet.) The anger in that post was real – the post was truthful in that respect – but as a representation of someone else, it was anything but objective.

The central subject of a personal blog is, by definition, the blogger herself. My theories and anecdotes are not scrupulously fact-checked; when I express an opinion I do not assume that I have an obligation to give equal weight to all sides. I am by nature an exaggerator; to curb that tendency here would, perhaps, elevate the truthfulness of my blog in general, but it would make it a less faithful representation of me.

The person I write about in this blog - Ms. B&P, Professor Bubandpie - is a construct. She leapt into being when I clicked "Create Blog" one spring day last year, and she has grown through a kind of awkward adolescence into what strikes me occasionally as a brash and over-confident adulthood. She is not me. And yet, my satisfaction in blogging arises almost entirely from my sense that she is me, a truer, realer me than the one who is so fettered by the conventions of real life. When I see my blog mentioned in a post, the little shock of recognition that goes over me is closely akin to the reflex that whips my head around when I hear my name called out on the street.

Truthfulness in blogging does not require objectivity, fact-checking, or even a willingness to lay bare the dark secrets of the soul. It is, I think, more social than that: it has to do with the claims we make on our readers. Even the most innocuous sort of fact-bending – the use of “today” for events that occurred yesterday – can be false if it elicits an outpouring of support for a crisis that no longer exists. Outright fabrications violate the spirit of blogging – but never more so than when they are employed to manipulate readers’ emotions, to elicit sympathy to which one is not entitled.

Our culture places enormous pressure on mothers to represent ourselves falsely – to smile stiffly when round-the-clock nursing has filled us with sleep-deprivation and rage, to mouth platitudes like “It’s all worth it” rather than speaking honestly about our fears, our obsessiveness, our chronic indecision and self-doubt. The blogosphere is not so much a place where we are required to speak these truths as an open invitation to do so. This kind of truth-telling isn’t an obligation – it’s an opportunity and sometimes even an addiction.

***********************************************************************************

What do you think?

Blog Art

2007-09-19T13:39:00.000-07:00

Blog Art is by Julie Green of Learning & Laughter.

I teach writing, among other things. From day one of each course I teach, I emphasize that good writing requires, more than anything else, knowing your audience and being as specific and clear as possible. This last bit means using illustrative examples and polished prose. The first bit requires experience, insight, and intuition. If you lack any or all of those and still want to get a good grade, it requires meeting with your professor and asking, “What audience should I be writing for? What kind of language is appropriate? What counts as credible evidence?” Students who lack the intuition and who refuse to approach their professors often end up with mediocre grades that could have, should have, been better ones. These students assume that writing is this baffling room to which they have been barred access. They consider themselves blacklisted.

Blogging, though, is so wonderfully, oddly, even frustratingly different. Because you don’t know your audience. Or, sometimes you know specific people in your audience (I know that my mom, my sister-in-law, my friend from yoga read what I write here) but not others.

When blogging, you’re writing your own audience. Creating it with each word you type, each image you project, each story you carefully (or not so carefully) craft. It’s such a postmodern-seeming concept it’s almost hard to wrap your head around:

Your audience doesn’t exist until you create it. The audience you get is the one you make.

It’s an extremely liberating idea, at first glance. I am allowed to write as if no one’s reading, to adapt a modern-day cliché. I can share things I wouldn’t ever usually share, and hide things I can’t usually hide.

But at the same time, I think very few of us write just for the sake of writing. As a friend of mine who feared that reading my blog was like reading my diary recently wrote, “if you didn't want anyone to read it you wouldn't publish it online.” She is so right. So that leads to the question: if I want an audience, how do I get it?

Sure, in a sense I write my audience, making conscious and unconscious decisions along the way: will I use profanity in my posts? talk about my sex life? my husband? when and how will I use humor? what styles of writing will I use in my posts? will I participate in contests, carnivals, etc.? will my posts usually be long or short? will I use photographs? personal ones? will I link to other blogs and websites, situating myself within a loosely defined community?

But in another real and equally strange sense, I must go find my audience. I have to find the right people – the people who will admire the choices I’ve made along the way, who will like my mix of humor and reflectiveness, who will care what I write – and I have to get them to my blog. Again and again.

My audience doesn’t exist until I create it, and in this case that means not just writing it but going out and finding it. Is this easier or harder than writing through more traditional channels? Is it easier to write a query letter to a major magazine, a local newspaper, or a well-established online zine than to work the web looking for an audience for your work? Maybe yes, maybe no.

But there definitely is something satisfying about going out and getting it yourself. Something very empowering about writing first, addressing audience second. I’m trying to think whether there are parallels and I think there are: painting, poetry, other forms of art whose purpose is expression before economics. I doubt many folks would put bloggers in the same category as they would Picasso, but in a very real way I think that blogging is – or can be – a very high form of personal expression.

Of art.

About Julie Green...
I am currently a Ph.D. student in English at The Ohio State University, where I study twentieth-century American literature and teach writing, literature, and film courses to undergraduates. I completed a B.S. in Communication at Cornell University and an M.A. in English at Ohio State. I was born and raised in Fairport, New York and moved to Columbus in 2003 with my now-husband, a lawyer at the Ohio Secretary of State's office. We were married in June 2005 and celebrated the birth of our first child on our second wedding anniversary.

Belonging

2007-09-14T04:54:00.000-07:00

What part of yourself do you have invested in the online community? A good number of the posts and comments here at BlogRhet over the last few months have either addressed or resonated with this question. There have been posts and comments about race and culture and how the differences among us in this respect colour our perception of the blogging world. There have been comments about inclusion and exclusion, ranging from the sense of alienation many of us take away from high school, through the discussions of tagging and sub groups inside the mommy bloggers' orbit and often touching on commenting and response to blog posts. What all the discussion seems to have in common is good will, the determination to make the community work and the willingness to speak openly and expose deep emotions in the cause of making this happen.

'I was always on the outside in high school' is a very common comment. 'I wasn't one of the popular kids'. 'I felt alienated'. 'I'm shy and inhibited face to face'. 'I don't feel confident about meeting people' -- a statement a lot of us made, while discussing the BlogHer conference and at other times. A recurring theme among those of us who answered the BlogRhet meme was that the online contacts were somehow more engaging and fulfilling than 'IRL' day to day interactions. (I think IRL is short for In Real Life - one of the things I have had to learn fast is the acronyms, short forms and references that are in common use in this on line world. What's a 'MILF', anyone?) Those of us not part of the 'white' dominant culture express concern about feeling that an important part of ourselves is not valued or ignored.

There are two areas where my experience closely matches that of the comments and posts I've been citing. One is in feeling that the online lives I touch and the discussions I have here are more fulfilling than most of my daily contacts. The other is that I am a minority; because I'm a senior I'm sometimes treated differently or with indifference by people who deal with me face to face. While agism is not on the same page as racism, getting put down or ignored because of white hair and wrinkles sure gives me empathy.

What I have invested in my blog and here is my love of writing and a commitment to write, to stretch myself, to participate in as many of the threads and tags and challenges as I can. The bloggers that I feel the most kinship with are the others of you that are doing that. The quality of a lot of what I read, and the quality of the women and men who are writing is thrilling. The encouragement, the positive responses and the wonderful way in which ideas and techniques are shuttled from person to person through the mommyblogging community is enriching, I believe, to all of us.

Some of you have invested your hearts and souls, your most cherished ideas, your emotional responses, your deepest selves in your blogs, reaching out to others in so many ways. You discuss race, religion, your personal fears and triumphs, your intimate lives. You not only write, you read, and the comments you leave when someone needs a response or comfort or advice are generous, perceptive and often hilarious. The courage of some of you, who meet very difficult days with laughter and share the experience, is immense.

When we write with this intensity, however, it is not hard to be nervous, even fearful, about the response we will get. I know that I sometimes have an inner insecure self who worries about how what I write will be received, who is disappointed when there are no comments, who feels down if something doesn't get noticed. I find it necessary to stomp on this tendency as soon and as often as possible. Because the mommy blogosphere is full of generous people who read, comment and respond and who feel guilty when they can't do so. I can't get to all the posts I want to read as soon as I would like and most of the people I know about are much busier than I am. It continues to amaze me that there is so much comment and exchange when I know how short of time and energy many people are.

Getting comments fosters a sense of belonging. So does the receipt of one of the various awards that bounce through the blogs -- things like the Just Post, the Perfect Post, The Thinking Blogger, the ROFL. Getting 'tagged' to do a meme is also a boost to the camaraderie quotient. I think these are all good things. But they come with a price. To get one of the post awards, it is necessary to write that kind of post. It is also gracious to look for posts that fit the criteria and nominate them. Established bloggers go out of their way to select newbies for awards and tags, which is one of the things I like a lot about them, but they can't include everybody. It is not productive to be hurt if you aren't selected for something: tags, for instance, only work if they are consistently spread. We should participate as much as we can and understand that others are doing the same, without being too dependent on this kind of recognition.

The forum here at BlogRhet has one of the best formats I have found. I stuck my neck out and volunteered to be part of it, as a real newbie, was welcomed in and am really glad I joined. It's inclusive, stimulating and fun. It's managed by a bunch of horrifically busy women and so the bus wheels may occasionally wobble but, by and large, it's amazingly smooth. And really worthwhile. If you're reading this at my own site, please pop over and scroll through it. You'll be glad you did.

But in the final analysis, the feeling of belonging is something each of us has to create for herself. It comes from confidence that what we write will resonate with others and that other writers will appreciate our comments. Most of all, it comes from the satisfaction of having done well in what we set out to do.

Posted By Mary G -- Them's My Sentiments

Invisible = White

2007-09-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

Guest Post from Dawn of Baleful Regards (originally posted at Baleful Regards.)

*** I started my TA position in Multicultural education today. I had forgotten how much I love this topic, but it came rushing back today as we started simply talking about some of the words and meanings.

This was from the first part of a thesis I wrote for my Master's degree. As I have said before this was a very, very long exploration from several angles - teacher, parent, citizen, wife and mother. This piece is about white privilege and learning to "see" that I had benefited in my culture simply from being white. I thought it was a good day to re-publish this piece, in honor of my journey beginning again.****

As an Early Childhood educator, I recognized the importance of this work on behalf of the children and families we serve. Without an exploration of our internal bias and recognition of the privileges that come from being white in a white society, how can we hope to welcome all families and children into the classroom? If, as a White college educated woman, I cannot recognize and be aware of the advantage that I am automatically granted as a member of the dominant culture, how can I truly advocate for all families and children? How can these families feel welcomed in a classroom in which I teach?

My mother-in-law in Detroit will often tell me that white people are crazy. I used to assume this was a kind of funny endearment. When I asked my husband about this, his response was “White People are crazy. She means it”. I have come to understand the meaning of this phrase, not as an endearment, but as an extremely serious statement.

I am fortunate. I am the white member of a black family from Detroit. They love me as a member of their family and I am afforded a unique view into a family from a race and culture other than my own. They view my questions and inquiries about these obvious issues with patience and love. The white culture in which I was raised did not openly address these topics and I am asking things to find out. I want to know because they are my family too, and because I am the mother of a bi-racial daughter, who will have to navigate these unsteady racial waters in ways that I never was required to think about.

When my mother in law says this phrase “White people are crazy” this is what she means. White People are the dominant culture in the United States. They are the holders of nearly all the political, social and economic power in our society. They design and control our government, our schools, and our legal system. White people control most of the media outlets – radio, television, and newspaper and book publishers. White people have designed a total system that grants them implicit favors and privileges as they navigate these systems. Yet, they blatantly, as a group, deny this. White people point to a select few of other racial heritage that have been successful as examples of the equality and fair treatment afforded to all Americans. White people will tell you how all of that discrimination “stuff” was in the past, that they had nothing to do with that. Most of the White people who say these things truly believe them. However, for American persons of other non-white heritage, this is a glaring un-truth. To co-opt a phrase from a twelve-step group – The elephant is in the room and only the white people can’t see it.

For my mother in law and husband, the refusal to “see” on the part of white people makes them crazy and untrustworthy. Terrance’s wife, her daughter in law and mother of her granddaughter is one of these white people. I am a white person and admit that I spent most of my life not seeing the elephant.

For my journey into the issues of anti-bias curriculum, the beginning came with my relationship with my husband. While there had been no overt statements of racial or other bias in my family, I was taken aback by the vehemence of my mother’s reaction when I announced my relationship with Terrance. The stream of racist and hateful language that flowed from my mother shocked and horrified me. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I was to go out with him that day, I could find another place to live and finance the rest of my college education. The threat was unveiled and clear. Walk away from the black man, or walk away from your comfortable life.

In those moments, I made a decision that would influence the rest of my life. I uncovered my mother as racist. I consciously walked away from the privileges of my white family. This action solidified my emerging sense that issues of race and culture were to be a crucial part of my personal and professional life. However, my liberal education and background was shaken to the core. My white liberal Democratic people were not supposed to react like this when confronted with issues of race. I was ashamed and embarrassed that my family behaved this way.

When I discovered the Anti Bias Curriculum shortly after my graduation from college in 1992, I felt as if it were a professional revelation. This was what I had been looking for! While the topic of “multi-cultural education” was broached during my teacher education at the University of Vermont, it was not a central part of the education of emerging teachers. Preparing white teachers in Vermont did not seem to necessitate the discussion of issues of race and culture in society. We were, on the whole, upper middle class white students, preparing to teach white students.

During this time, I was also falling in love with a man not of my racial heritage. I was experiencing, for the first time, the obviousness of race in an all white environment. Walking into restaurants or stores, I noticed other white people noticing us. My invisibility in my culture, of which I had never been aware, was no longer afforded to me when I walked beside Terrance. I had crossed over a line that I previously did not know existed.

With time, my assimilation into a dual cultural role became as second nature. I stopped noticing because life consumed my attention. A career, a marriage and then a new baby shifted my focus from issues of race and culture to those of every day life. Occasionally, I would be jolted from complacence into thinking about this uncomfortable topic. From the elderly white woman who approached me with my infant daughter inquiring when I “got” her to the white father who loudly inquired to me why the child care center was closed for Civil Rights Day when there were no black people here; these incidents were always unexpected and left me speechless. I had forgotten that as a white woman, without my husband nearby, I visibly re-integrated back into the dominant white culture. This invisibility seemed a tacit permission, allowing other white people to say things in my presence that they would not dare speak of with my husband at my side.

As an educator, I had done a fair amount of exploration into the topic of Anti-Bias curriculum while teaching in my own classrooms. In pursuing accreditation by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, it was a criterion to be integrated into the mission and philosophy of the child care center. As the director of this center, I led the conversations of this topic in order to infuse everything we planned with an awareness of the messages we were sending to all families. As a mother of a bi-racial infant daughter, I became more aware of the urgency of the message of Anti-Bias curriculum on the part of the families we served.

These were not always pleasant conversations with teachers or parents. I was accused of being Anti-Christian, Racist, a promoter of Homosexuality, and even told I was a person looking to psychologically damage young children by removing holidays from our center curriculum. I preserved. My personal agenda to make that child care center a place of welcome and support for all families and children became a consuming work. Those staff that did not agree with my vision of anti-bias curriculum eventually left and I found others who shared a similar vision and were willing to commit to it.

Our NAEYC validation visit was scheduled on Halloween of 1999. The validator remarked that she had never seen such a calm, peaceful child care center on Halloween in her career. There were no costumes or candy. There were no excluded children due to religious beliefs. While not perfection, we were living much closer to the intent of Louise Derman Sparks work in Anti Bias Curriculum. We were not standing on the traditions of “we’ve always done it this way”, but rather examining the motives behind our traditions. We asked, “Is this good for children and families?” and let the answers guide our curriculum and policies.

How to measure the utility function of the Internet; OR why we flock here, my fellow birds

2007-08-31T10:20:00.000-07:00

After my husband completed his architecture degree, he conceded what the rest of us had known for a while: his interests were broader. When he decided to pursue another degree, this time in economics, a lot of people were surprised. What's economics got to do with architecture? Everything.

Architecture considers what the people demand, how to supply and fulfill that demand, and how to balance the environmental and space needs with the human demand. Architects use natural and created elements to manipulate space, light, dark, and shadow. What they create is not simply a structure, but is also a reflection of who we are as a culture:

Architectural works are perceived as cultural and political symbols and works of art. Historical civilizations are often known primarily through their architectural achievements. Such buildings as the pyramids of Egypt and the Roman Colosseum are cultural symbols, and are an important link in public consciousness, even when scholars have discovered much about a past civilization through other means. Cities, regions and cultures continue to identify themselves with and are known by their architectural monuments.

According to Lionel Robbins, economics is, "the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses."

Economics---resources, ends, supply, demand, means which have alternative uses---is the foundation in many ways for the types of architecture a culture and society produce. To my mind, there is a natural marriage among architecture, economics and sociology.

(Consider what our main architecture in the US reflects about our society, and its economics.)

Considering how these fields work together corporeally, I am not at all surprised that the same titles and principles have been employed in the technological---or cyber---world.

System architects perceive the three dimensional overall structure. They consider space and demand much as building architects consider it. When architects designed and engineers built the Internet, they did so because of an economic problem called scarcity.

"Scarcity means that available resources are insufficient to satisfy all wants and needs. Absent scarcity and alternative uses of available resources, there is no economic problem." (Source: Wikipedia)

These forward-thinking designers perceived the scarcity of a needed means of sharing and collecting information, noted the increasing demand for this, and observed that available resources had been maxed out.

Therefore, they incredibly thought of and created...the Internet.

Is the Internet as lasting and concrete as the Pyramids?

Only time will tell, but for now, it fulfills as culturally important a role as the Pyramids did.

At this point the Internet---as with a building---is in the hands of the users. You and I are now the architects of this space. We are maximizing its utility function, generating a high util measurement.

A utility function, as per Stephen Carter, is "a measure of a consumer's preferences expressed by the amount of satisfaction he or she receives from consumption of a set of desired goods or services."

I believe we receive a high degree of satisfaction from our use of the Internet, thus it is our preference, and the demand and supply curves would show dramatic rises---particularly in the social sector.

Carter goes on to say, "Economic theory assumes that people make rational efforts to maximize their utility. Sometimes one person's utility is dependent on another's."

And there we hit just past the how to the why: why are we so satisfied by the Internet, why are we so driven to it instead of to our corporeal society, and why does our demand continue to increase?

The reason we turn to the Internet is because of scarcity; we lack in our corporeal life the resources to fulfill our needs.

Why is that scarcity there, and why do we apply our own personal resources to developing goods and services that fulfill demand on the Internet instead of in corporeal life?

I say simply it is because of preference and satisfaction.

As the architects of our space, with a broader group of resources to draw upon, more market choice and 24/7 availability, it's easy to see the appeal.

It's also easy to apply the science. It's harder to apply the human element, which is the base of all of this.

So let me apply my human element, and you tell me if this is your why, too.

I don't live where I'm from. I'm surrounded by a lot of people who live here but also are not from here. Within our personal similarities are cultural differences, and vice versa. These can lead to misunderstandings, and because we do not know one another so well (through a lifetime), agendas and motives might also be misunderstood or hard to grasp, at least. Our relationships---which range from barely know to nodding acquaintances to social buddy to friend to close friend---don't go back very far or very deep. Out of need, we form quick intimacies, which occasionally lead to sharer's regret. We dance an awkward country line, coming together and drifting back apart as our lives, schedules, personal demands, and emotional issues and needs come into play.

I'm used to this. I attended four elementary schools (in six years), two junior highs (in three years), and one high school (in three years). By the time I hit high school, I wasn't at all enamored of our location, and after repeated pleas for boarding school somewhere northeast fell on deaf ears, I made the best of it, knowing it would all be behind me in a few years. When I ran into people I knew from high school in college, it surprised me that (a) they still got together with one another and (b) they wondered why I never did.

I saw no point; they were simply people I knew. It was easy to meet people and get to know them. It's easy to create a long list of people you know. Making friends...now that's the real challenge.

If after, for example, the three years of high school you and I were still not friends, the likelihood that we would be so was slim, therefore I had little motivation to seek you out when I could easily fill my life with other people I knew but who were not friends...and who I didn't need to go out of my way to see because they were already there, crossing my path regularly. Does this sound cold and cruel? It was a lesson my life brought to me.

Longevity was not in my vocabulary. In my mind, I had moved on. I had learned by seventh grade that long-distance friendships when you are young are nearly impossible to maintain (despite a few attempts) and it's better to just bucket sections of life and let the past remain in the past and move on to the future.

Although I think this cheats me (and some people I know) in some ways, I also think it better equips me to deal with the modern life I think most of us lead.

Our lives are completely portable now.

Jobs transfer us, opportunity far away beckons, even if we stay where we are, our friends and neighbors often move. People simply don't settle as they once did.

We also don't live out of homes in any sort of consistent fashion, as we once did.

I recall one halcyon neighborhood where we lived from about 1974 to 1978, or so. My father was, at the time, a Captain in the Army, and he had transferred from the active service to the reserves. He had an MBA and loads of skills from his military service, including how to deal with traumatized people. This all goes far in the corporate world. Therefore, he easily got a great job that came with stability as a benefit. So for these years, in this neighborhood, all the moms were stay at home moms and all the dads were home by 5 p.m. During the summer, the kids rotated through the houses and yards on the cul-de-sac with occasional forays to the convenience store for PopRocks and baseball card gum. During the school year, we walked (without parents) to the local elementary school in a big pack. In the afternoons the moms sat out front and the kids rode bikes and played and screamed like banshees. On Fridays we gathered at one neighbor's house and made homemade pizza. Adults ate in the dining room and the kids ate in the kitchen, then we resumed the outdoor playing. On the weekends someone hosted a barbecue. Once a week my mother took me and my sister to ballet. Now and again, I went home with a school friend. On the whole, though, our life revolved around and within our little neighborhood.

Somehow, for some reason, all of us hit this one space at this one time and were in sync. But this didn't surprise any of us. At the time, we expected it. That's typically how life was.

Now, finding that is unusual.

The world seems so much more dynamic. And I say that coming from a very dynamic childhood! But, I was the unusual one, you should understand. Everywhere I moved I was an anomaly, The New Kid. When I tried to go back to my last place, I found that while my departure had initially created a hole, it had quickly closed up, and we were all awkward with my de trop presence. When I tried to fit in to the new place, I found the same thing.

In general, I made friends with the few other transients. We all had the same sort of mentality: finish out the sentence in this location, then get our personal belongings, catch a bus and move on the the next place.

As I said, by high school we had all realized that friends are usually the here and now, not so much BFF as BFFN (best friends for now). Mr. Right? No, Mr. Right Now.

A boy I dated in high school kept talking about the future. I'd hum and haw, plead youth, and finally one day I said, "Seriously, neither of us even knows where we'll be in a year much less what we'll be doing...how can you think and plan about the future this way?"

It was a shock to him. He had lived in the same house in the same neighborhood in the same town since birth. Life, from his vantage, was stable, predictable, plannable. Foundations were solid. You could count on the essential elements always being in place.

I saw life as something you responded to more than controlled.

And so, this current life---of people coming and going; companies changing names and merging and diverging every six months; schedules always on different patterns and rarely crossing; taking friendship where you find it and knowing it will likely end in some way when your paths diverge---is no surprise to me, although I suspect it is for some people.

With little depth and history to our relationships, the investment in each other is, I theorize, lesser. Additionally, the personal demands within life are greater. Therefore, I believe the limit on what we can offer to one another emotionally, as support or going out of our way, is lesser. In fact, I don't know that this is a strong value within our society any longer. As Gwen recently said during our school discussion, there is a high value placed on individualism, and at what cost to society as a whole?

The problem is, the need doesn't decrease.

We still need those friendships, that place you go where everybody knows your name, where you can find friendship and support---and we expect much of it. Because we know there must be someone out there just like me or in my same boat, we seek that at times.

I believe more than ever in an increasingly diverse world, we crave similarity. More than ever in an increasingly mobile and dynamic world, we crave stability.

The Internet offers that.

Bloggers can move countries and that is transparent to us! (Yes, I am referencing Joy.) Our different patterns of life and complicated schedules are transparent. The amazingly and increasingly complex world---with more and more objects demanding our attention and the instant and constant accessibility we carry with us everywhere---that can overwhelm our senses are, ironically, quieter on the Internet.

In the dead of night or quiet of morning, at nap time, lunch time, whatever time we find, we can sit, and focus our thoughts into written communication of needs and ideas...uninterrupted. We can respond to one another in the same way.

We can control our investment, how close or how far we get with other people.

We are the architects of our socialization on the Internet.

We create the demand, maximize our utility, allow online social networks to succeed by our preferences and satisfaction received, and the demand grows. At some point there must be some market clearing, equilibrium...or maybe not.

Why do we prefer this? Because it's here on our time and on our terms. It provides goods and services we can't find in our daily life. And why doesn't daily life provide this? Because as our specific demand and expectations of need fulfillment grow, our sense of community and societal cohesion shrinks, ironically, through the expansion of the world.

Moreover, rather than simply having to dig deep sometimes or move on, however unfulfilling that might feel at first, on the Internet, we can feed whatever our need is, endlessly. The near infinite level of supply, through rotable people,keeps our emotions feeling as fat and happy our our middle-class bellies.

My thesis was: Support and sympathy can understandably be in short supply in daily life. If I find myself impatient with my own lingering problems, I can only imagine how my friends---with equally full and busy lives---run out of top priority space for my issues. It's no surprise then that sympathy runs out or is distracted before need ends. The Internet offers an unending supply of near-endless support. But that's not the only reason I turn to it for friendship...

So how would you respond to this question? How do you respond to my answer?

Copyright 2007 Julie Pippert
Also blogging at:
Using My Words (formerly Ravin' Picture Maven)
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About-HOUSTON-TX.com: HOT scoop about H-Town!

To Market, To Market We Go

2007-08-31T06:00:00.000-07:00

The university I attended required all incoming freshman in the College of Communications to take a gut course, COM 101.

Memorable mostly for its 8 a.m. starting time, the class supposedly cut across all mass communications disciplines.

I spent many of the sessions sitting in the back of the room - a movie theater, actually - doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, recklessly, in ink.

The theories floated by our professors had ridiculous names like "The Cool Hand Luke Theory" and the "Hypodermic Needle Theory."

However, one morning I happened to be paying attention when it was stated that the future of communications would be based on one intangible commodity: information.

A marketplace of ideas, the professors said, would come to exist with the help of miles and miles of fiber-optic cable, connecting the entire "global village."

Ha! Can you imagine? This was waaaay back in 1989. We didn't have email and I saved all my papers on a floppy disc inserted into my Mac Classic.

But lo and behold, this theory, which seemed so laughable to me, has come to exist and nowhere is that more evident than in the explosion of blogs.

My Google homepage has a widget that gives me access to The New York Times online, and lately no less than three of the headlines splashed across my screen are links to blogs published by the nation's newspaper.

Incredible! Here, side by side with me, is The New York Times.

Self-publishing via blogs revolutionized how I read. Never before have I had access to so many voices, experiences, races, ethnicities and geographies. My site statistics file shows flickers of interest from Hong Kong, Australia and Europe.

Where my point of view was once limited to my local newspaper, television and nationally published periodicals, I can now access information, news and analysis from all over the globe, with little effort.

This revolution allows writers who would previously go unread the ability to reach out and promote their work, in some cases - like mine - driving some revenue, however small, from words they drafted on a lark.

While I won't get into the debate on the relationship between marketing and bloggers, I do believe that bloggers are, indeed, major influencers in the marketplace. Never before have we had the opportunity to harness the power of so many visions and voices to make changes not only in the world of capitalism, but in the world at large.

We must act fast, before the horse runs away without the rider. We must look, learn, read, discern and recognize the power laid out before us.

Now is our time.

Blogging - redefining friendship in the 2.0 world

2007-08-25T13:48:00.000-07:00

How is blogging like keeping a pen-pal? Is it at all? Let's see: you can keep in touch, cross continents. There is often dialogues and confessions. Conversations are as likely to be continued via email, person to person, once contacts and trust has been established. It is arguably more convenient, also. One can choose to leave comments or not. One can choose not even to visit a blog or not anymore. That arguably leaves less evidence than of a hand-written relationship; of papers left in drawers, aged epistles which are proof of the owner’s lack of depth or patience.

I have a secret. When I was in primary school, there was an initiative to begin a pen-pal program with kids in America. Sexes were split between hats and our future correspondent was drawn as a lottery-- about as random a start to a relationship as any. Thus, many, I’m certain, were doomed from the start. Mine sure was. I do not remember much about my pen-pal, except that she lived in Ohio, and had the roundest, happiest writing I have ever seen and for years after associated with the personality of Americans as a whole. Did I respect her though? No. It was the writing; I have long had mistrust for people with nice penmanship (as those with appalling penmanship, like me, tend to do). So every time I got a letter on that pastel pink paper, peppered with love-hearts instead of dots on the ‘i’s, it made my young blood boil. Would it now? No.

But now I have other tastes to discriminate with.

If I am perusing new blogs and am in less than a benevolent mood, I could (and have) spent a good few minutes coveting their design, their owner’s ability to photoshop, their spacial abilities to be able to fit all their images and accoutrement's into the coding matrix. I can on mine, don't get me wrong, but that’s only because I paid someone to set it up to my liking in the first place. I sometimes feel like a fraud. I feel like I’m one of those domineering (male) bosses in those old movies, dictating speeches and letters to a secretary who is madly typing nearby, being the facilitator of information. What exactly have I done on my blog that is completely unique?

Which brings us to ‘voice’. Of course, our ‘voice’ is our own. No-one’s blog can be exactly like another for that reason. But I adulterate my voice at times, so how can my ‘friendships’ that are based upon the words which I write be fully legitimate? It’s like I’m friendly with ghosts, and they’re friendly with a simulacrum of me. I can see why such conferences as Blogher, then, are so vitally important. They give bloggers a chance to socialise face-to-face; in the ‘old-fashioned’ way. I’m sitting here, on the underside of the planet, where I guess I feel safe to wonder such things, but I wonder what women get out of meeting fellow bloggers? Do any get pinched by the little gremlin of jealousy? Of envy? Of awe? Do they get out of the experience all that they’ve hoped for?

I must admit; I've struggled this week. I've returned from a month's holiday, from (enforced and situational) unplugging. So, if I read your blog, you might've noticed I've not been around for a while. Or have you?

So the other night, I sat down to hundreds and hundreds of unread feeds from my favourite blogs. Do you know what I felt? Dread. A weight of unconquerable labour was gently massaging my head, about to drop completely. Could I really sift through all these posts? Did I want to? These people were my 'friends'. What did I do? I hit 'delete all'*; taking me back to nothingness.

It was a relief: so what in the hell kind of friend am I?

It doesn't seem I've changed very much from when I was a child, abandoning my long-distance pen-pal, does it? I would never knock on a RL friend's door after a month's absence, poke my head through, ask her what she's been up to for the past month, and when she's about to reply, I just put up my hand and say, "Hang on, not interested. Let's just continue our friendship from...now." So why do I do it online? And why am I confessing this secret here, where many of you are my friends, and I am fully expecting an irate retaliation (which I may or may not deserve).

What kind of friend are you? Do you do the same? How do you justify your blogging practice? Or have you been more sensible than I and decided not to follow any sort of self-imposed policy?

Or do you suspect, as I do, that I think way too much about all this. Fullstop. Period.

*On about 75% of them, as it turned out. I checked. But it's still a lot!

Crossposted at Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum. Forgive me if I don't respond to comments today. I will be in at the Melbourne Writer's Festival and won't return until later. Then I will.

Lifting the Veil of the Inner Blogologue.

2007-08-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

"This will make for a great blog post."
"I am so blogging this."
"Well, at least I got a good blog out of it."

I cringe when I hear these statements. Such hyper-self-awareness makes me uncomfortable. Why? Aaah, because we hate in others that which we loathe in ourselves.

Frequently, more so than I would like to admit, I find myself composing blog posts in my head about an event which I am still in the middle of experiencing. Think of me like Harold Crick, played by Will Ferrell, in "Stranger than Fiction," only my narrator has more of a Southern accent and less of a charming British one. And let me tell you, it is distracting.

A veil of creativity drops before our eyes. We begin to see our
experiences through the thin veil of our blog. We recognize perfect "sound bites." We spot ideal illustrative pictures. We start composing. And if we aren't mindful, we slightly disengage, lost in our own heads.

Perhaps more to the point, then, think of me as Zach Braff's character, Dr. John "J.D." Dorian, on NBC's "Scrubs." While narrating his life in his head, he sometimes gets this faraway look on his face, absorbed in his own self-analysis, and misses what is happening right in front of him. Much to the annoyance of the people around him, I should add. Ahem.

This past Easter was the first with my blog. Toward the end of our family Easter activities, my two year old son began dismembering his very first jumbo chocolate bunny, an occasion worth capturing in photographs for our family album, to be sure. However, as I was snapping away, my husband said to me, under his breath, "You are taking that picture for your blog, aren't you?" I looked up, grateful to see that he was smirking, but felt the warm rush of a blush coming to my face. I was taking this particular picture, a closeup of the gnawed bunny ear, for my blog. Busted.

The first time of many in which I would be busted during an inner blogologue, that being a blog-centric inner monologue.

We all do it. And we can see when others are doing it, too, if we are fortunate enough to be IRL friends with other bloggers, or conventional writers, for that matter. Sometimes they will confirm it outright, other times you can see it in their eyes. They are composing. If we are competitive, we start counter-composing, trying to find the other angle, the more clever turn. If we are credible, we don't start directing.

On the heels of the BlogHer conference, you can almost see it happening in the pictures. You can see the blogging wheels turning. Look at enough Flickr albums and you will begin to recognize the blog-posts-in-progress, as they were at the time. Some bloggers might as well have written the imagined future post titles on their foreheads for future reference.

Is there something disingenuous about this behavior? Does it lend a sense of insincerity to the eventual post when it's not written on the fly at your keyboard? Maybe that is why I blushed when my husband caught me taking pictures for my blog and not solely for our family album. Perhaps on some level, I want my audience to believe that I never consider my blog other than during the moments when I am actually writing. My life and my blog as two separate streams, meeting only during the time that I am writing. But should "writing" be limited to the minutes during which my fingers are tapping keys?

Frequently, we come across blog posts about the internet connection of a fellow blogger having been down and that blogger having gone a little cabin-feverish with unwritten blog posts mounting in their heads as their usual outlet is unavailable. The blog infiltrates, the veil drops. And we compose.

All of the previous questions aside, I know the answer to the following question: Does my inner blogologue cause me to disengage, even a little, from the events I am currently experiencing? The answer is "yes." The veil of creativity lowers and I know I am not in the moment as much as I was only seconds before. Yet, I can't help it. Or I don't want to.

Consider your child's birthday party. You spend hours, if not days, planning every detail. You revel in the excitement and embrace the hopefulness of the anticipation. Then the day comes, the guests arrive, all of your plans begin to fall seemingly effortlessly into place as everyone is clearly enjoying themselves. It would be a shame to forget this day, so you pick up the camera, whether it be your still camera or your video camera, or goodness forbid-- both, and you start trying to capture these magical moments for your (probably largely unaware) toddler.

You pat yourself on the back for the beautiful shots you are catching. You can already see the pride on your spouse's face when you show them your clever angles and perfect moments. You are getting it all down, all the smiles, all the surprises, all of it. Well, all of it except for one small detail: you. Days later, you'll frown when you realize that you aren't in any of the pictures.

Just as the lowering of the blogging veil temporarily separates us from the events about which we plan to write, the lens of the camera can cut us off from that which we are so intent on capturing. Sometimes it is only after the fact that we realize our peripheral vision was more severely inhibited than we noticed at the time. We hear a funny anecdote about that birthday party and think, "Where was I? Oh yeah, I was taking pictures across the room."

The camera limits your vision to what can be seen directly in front of your lens. Your inner blogologue splits your engagement between the event as it is happening in your head and as it is happening in your real life. Can you not write your life and live it, too?

The opposite could be argued, however. You could say that knowing that you are going to write about something in your blog gives you a different perspective as you are experiencing it, allowing you to see it from different angles. Something that might normally push you over the edge loses some of its own edge because you can see the humor in the situation, as it will be written. Hell, you might even reenact some of it so that you can catch that picture that will send the post right over into hilarity. That is, if you don't just grab your camera as it is happening. All for the sake of the blog. And maybe a bit of your sanity. Yes, an argument I can understand.

More than ever, we are living in our own heads. The crazy thing is that by doing so, we are consequently engaging with others more than ever. What would have been a funny story between you and your spouse is now a funny story between you, your spouse, and your audience. Do we sacrifice an amount of our engagement for a later prolonged enjoyment of the event? Possibly, though not deliberately. Is that a negative thing? You tell me.

The next time the veil of your inner blogologue begins to lower, take notice. Do you stop it? Do you embrace it? Does anyone else notice? Are you embarrassed if they do? Does this, overall, enhance our experiences in the long run?

Just as I am grateful for our albums full of photographs, albeit mostly without me in them, I know I will be grateful for my blog years from now. Sacrifices of time and engagement be damned. Lower the veil again so that I may see and record and remember.

* * * * * * *
Velveteen Mind

Race and Collaborative Blogging

2007-08-15T10:46:00.000-07:00

I'm Glennia, a guest poster here this week. I am a Korean-American, the product of a Caucasian father and a Korean mother. For my entire life, I've embraced the duality of my heritage, faced being the "Asian girl" in my all-white school in Ohio, and the "white girl" when visiting my relatives Korea. I am always checking "Other" on government forms when asked about my race. I am the perpetual "other."

I started my blog, The Silent I, nearly two years ago, to share information about a Katrina relief trip that I took with my friend, Jill Asher. After the torrent of words and stories spilled out, I realized how much I loved writing. I then started blogging the stories of our family travels, the small details of places and people we met. I blogged so that I would not forget. I blogged to capture memories for my son to read when he grows up, when the places we've been to as a family are only distant echoes to him. I am an observer and storyteller, bearing witness to the small details and nuances of life.

After blogging on my own for a while, I started to contribute to two collaborative blogs. As a mixed race person, it is probably only fitting that I contribute to two very different group blogs, one with a Korean-theme and the other made up of primarily Caucasian women who live in Silicon Valley. My experiences with these two communities have been as different as the two sides of my heritage.

Kimchi Mamas is collaborative blog of women with ties to Korea. Stumbling upon this blog and "meeting" the Kimchi Mamas on-line was like being reunited with some long-lost relatives, people I pined for, but didn't actually know. The site has been a place where I can read about current events in Korea, Korean culture, and stories of growing up hapa in a world that defines us as one thing or another. The blog sits at the intersection of culture and parenting, dealing with parental struggles to keep the best parts of our culture and instill a respect of our Korean heritage in our children. We often talk about race and culture on Kimchi Mamas, and have open threads for readers to discuss the things that are on their minds. We've had racists attacks that lead to people being banned, but for the most part, it's a lively, respectful discussion.

Recently, I shared a story with the Kimchi Mamas on helping my mom study to become a US citizen when I was 8 years old. It was a memory that I cherish, an experience that shapes much of my outlook on citizenship, social responsibility, and my identity as a Korean-American. I knew that I could share it there, with other children of immigrants and and they would understand. I received numerous comments from readers, sharing their own citizenship stories or their memories of helping parents and grandparents study for the citizenship exam, and comments from people who are thinking about becoming citizens themselves. On my personal blog, when I cross-posted the same story, I got comments like, "That was a nice story." The difference was that the Kimchi Mamas related to the story on a deeply personal level; my blog readers read it as just another observation.

I think at Kimchi Mamas, many of us find a community that we don't find in our daily lives, and a safe place to discuss things that others in our social spheres might not understand. I had dinner with two other Kimchi Mamas a few months ago, and one of them remarked, "I think this is the biggest gathering of Korean-Caucasian hapa women I've ever been to!"

It seemed funny that three people would be a large gathering, but true. There aren't many places where you find large communities of mixed-race people, but when we do get together, there is an instant recognition, a familiarity that comes from being the perpetual "other." There is a twenty year age gap between myself and the youngest Kimchi Mama, but I find that the experiences of all of them resonate with me, even if lives have been completely different from each other.

The Silicon Valley Moms Blog is a collaborative blog that a couple of friends of mine started about the same time as Kimchi Mamas. The writers are predominately white and middle class, with several Asian moms in the mix (though the founders have tried to recruit other moms of color to contribute). In the SV Moms Blog, the things we have in common are a location and the fact that we are all mothers. There are a number of different points of view represented on all different issues. For the most part, the postings are funny stories about being a less-than-perfect parent and the crazy place we call home, along with some topical stories thrown in for discussion. The community aspect of the blog is apparent when we get together in person, and in off-line discussions.

On SV Moms, Race is rarely a topic that is discussed, and when it has been, it has been somewhat incendiary, as Jason mentioned in his posting. There are postings that I relate to, and some I can't fathom at all. I don't have the same sense of cohesion and community that I have with Kimchi Mamas, but I enjoy reading the various points of view that come across on SV Moms. I can't say that I "know" who the readers are in the same way that I have gotten to know the Kimchi Mama readers from their frequent comments.

When Kelly of Mocha Momma raised her question at BlogHer in the "State of the Momosphere" session and asked why advertisers don't solicit help from bloggers of color, it occured to me that I get solicited by advertisers fairly regularly on my personal blog and via the SV Moms, but have never seen a request come through Kimchi Mamas. It wasn't something that I thought of previously, and figured that maybe one of the other Kimchi Mamas were handling any requests for these types of things, or the group had decided not to accept any advertising beyond the BlogHer ads. Then, Stefania spoke up and said that Kimchi Mamas has not received any marketing requests. At the time, I felt like I was gobsmacked in the head with a big old reality check.

I sat in that session and tried to wrap my head around this information. I was wondering why I get solicited to try products, but the Kimchi Mamas blog does not. Is it because I have an Anglo name? I don't hide the fact that I'm half-Korean on my blog, but I don't have many pictures of myself, and it's not the subject of every blog post. I see that as part of my identity as writer, mother, wife, citizen, traveler, lawyer, and all the other aspects of myself. It is perhaps the singular thing that defines me at my core: person of mixed-race, always balancing between two worlds.

Kimchi Mamas has about ten times the number of readers than my personal blog does, and a much more devoted fan-base. We have regular readers and commenters there that are as much a part of the life of the blog as the contributors . The Silicon Valley Moms Blog gets a dozen solicitations per day from advertisers, and has a similar number of readers/page views per day as Kimchi Mamas. Why is that? Is it because the Silicon Valley Moms Blog does a better job of selling itself that Kimchi Mamas? Possibly. Or do the advertisers shy away from something that is perceived to be "too ethnic" to have broad appeal, while SV Moms are considered to be mostly white and upper middle class?

After Kelly raised her question, I now think it is the latter. I also think it is a huge mistake on the part of the advertising world to ignore the community aspects of blogs like Kimchi Mamas and Rice Daddies and the loyalty and participation they engender.

Some of the advertisers have argued back that they go with "quantitative" analysis of Technorati rankings and perceived popularity of particular blogs to determine the blog's influence. I don't think that argument holds water. If it's influence marketers are seeking, then it would seem that a qualitative analysis would be more fitting. One measure of that might be reader loyalty. How many subscribers does a blog have? How many active, repeat commenters?

Additionally, I don't think it should matter one whit if my last name is Campbell or Kim or Leung as to whether or not I would drink a particular brand of coffee or use a particular detergent. If advertisers are going to seek us out, they should solicit to us as educated and thoughtful consumers first, and as people of a particular race or background second. We can decide what is appropriate for ourselves.

I think that one of the great developments in the blogosphere over the past few years has been the emergence of sites people of color come together to share their experiences in a safe place for discussion and consideration. Aside from the ones Jason mentioned, there is Nisaa (We Are Muslim Women) and Sepia Mutiny (Indian-American). I enjoy reading those blogs because they offer insight into communities that I don't know much about, and help me better understand the world. I think advertisers miss the mark completely when they ignore the impact of these types blogs and their ability to foster community and influence readers.

Collaborative blogs allow different voices within a defined community to be heard, and allow people who are not of that particular background to gain insight and understanding. Stereotypes are harmful because they deny the essential humanity of the individual to think and act and make choices based on their own life experience. We live in a society that celebrates the "rugged individualist" and "out of the box thinker", but does everything it can to make everyone fit the same mold.

It is those individual stories and responses to the world that defy racial stereotyping and broad generalizations, but resonate deeply and build community. They are stories that need to be told. They are stories that need to be heard. Embracing those stories and communities makes them no longer other; it makes them us.

what’s race got to do with it: some thoughts on parentblogging, community and identity

2007-08-13T06:21:00.000-07:00

This week at BlogRhet we're featuring posts and interviews and general discussion on the topic of race and identity in the blogosphere. Be sure to weigh in with your thoughts in comments, or write a post and send us the link.

TODAY: guest post by Jason of Daddy In A Strange Land and RiceDaddies; cross-posted at Daddy In A Strange Land. (Tune into to Kristen's radio show this Wednesday to hear her chat with Jason on the topic of race and blogging.)

Last week, the parentblogosphere (or at least the neighborhood I frequent) was buzzing, post-BlogHer, with HKMIC (that’s Head Kimchi Mama In Charge) CityMama/Stefania Pomponi Butler’s smackdown on clueless PR flacks trying to get mombloggers to flog their stuff for free to their highly coveted demographic. Seems that that demographic of tech-savvy, hip, acquisitive parents doesn’t include parents of color. As for the perception that PR folks don’t pitch mombloggers of color, one dude straight-up told Stefania, “You’re right. We don’t pitch to bloggers of color. We just don’t know what to do with them.”

Ummm, say what? Now, before I go too much further, let me say this. This is not about wanting to be marketed to, or to be offered swag or recognition. I mean, sure, free stuff can be nice, and knowing that folks read you is ego-boosting, but you all know I write (unfortunately) so infrequently that I’m not about to put a reviews blog on my to-do list too, and I am so technologically backwards that I couldn’t tell you any site stats to save my life. And yes, some more diverse and non-stereotypical representations of p.o.c. in media, whether fictional, non-fictional or marketing, would be nice, but that’s a “duh” proposition, and a blog topic in and of itself (as are the concomitant topics of teaching critical media literacy to our kids and combating the ill effects of rampant commercialism and capitalism on our families and communities. (Say that five times fast.) [Have I told you how much I love the Home Depot ad where the AsAm mom bribes her daughter to trick the clueless AsAm dad into wanting new a new kitchen? Or the Baskin Robbins (I think) commercial with the AsAm grandpa (or older dad? could be!) who changes the kid’s F grade to an A because the offscreen mom had promised some ice cream treat for an A, and then he busts past the kid to get to the car first? Heh. But seeing as how I can’t even remember for sure who was selling what in that one, I guess it didn’t really work on me. Oh well.]

No, this goes beyond clueless folks who don’t know how (or why) to sell to parents of color. This is about how blogging, specifically by parents about the enterprise of parenting, builds communities that both replicate and challenge boundaries of inclusion and exclusion found in “the real world.” Though a lot of talk stemming from the BlogHer incident revolves around the marketing piece, let’s bring it back to the real, deeper question that Mocha Momma posed at the beginning of the State of the Momosphere panel: “I pointedly asked if we could please discuss the lack of racial diversity in the blogrolls and communities we find ourselves in as a general topic but if we could explore issues of moms of color.” When the conversation got stuck on marketing and monetization, she tried to get it back on track, asking the marketing folks, “When will the diversity come into play?” Except for Stefania’s comments, the assembled mombloggers let the question and the topic die, ignored. And here, then, is the crux of the matter, straight from Mocha Momma:

Certainly, I am grateful to the dozens of people I spoke to after the session was over. There was a full 20 minutes of chatting with people who agreed with my comment and told me to press on and to keep fighting for women of color. I needed something else instead. I needed any of them to take the microphone and say, “Excuse me. Isn’t anyone going to answer Kelly’s question?”

Where were you, Mommybloggers? I needed you.

The concept of finding community through blogging, especially parentblogging, is an interesting and important one to me, because I started reading blogs and writing blogs because, like so many, I was looking for online community to combat offline isolation. I was a multiracial, Asian American, politically liberal, stay-at-home-dad living in a conservative, homogenous, segregated, traditional community where all those things made me “other.” Of course, I was used to being “other,” I’d practically made a career of it. But in looking for information about being a SAHD, or even looking for a recommendation for a non-ugly diaper bag, I stumbled onto the parentblogosphere. A handful of dadblogs served as my gateway to more blogs, as every new blog and blogroll and comment link introduced me to a world of SAHDs and SAHMs and WAHDs and WAHMs and work-outside-the-home parents of all types and stripes.

And then I started to notice something, something not surprising for the guy who used to start every class in college by tallying apparent race and gender demographics in his notebook margins to get a preemptive handle on potential participation/representation issues: I started gravitating to bloggers who turned out to be parents of color, or parents (through adoption or intermarriage) of kids of color, or multiracial parents, or Asian American parents, and not only that, I started looking for them. It wasn’t that race, culture or identity were necessarily major themes or even talked about at all on all of these blogs, but when it was there, I noticed.

With those that did explicitly talk about the intersection of race, culture, family and parenting, the connection was even deeper. Why? Well, I guess that’s part of what we’re talking about here, or talking around—the invisible line between those who understand that, and those who even have to ask the question, and the wish that, at least in these virtual communities we share with others due to the ties of parenthood, we could get rid of that line altogether, or at least assume that those on the other side of it realize it’s there and are doing their part to erase it.

When we launched Rice Daddies as a group blog by Asian American dads, started with the only other two self-identified AsAm dadbloggers I’d been able to find at the time, I wrote that what we had in common was that we were Asian Americans who happened to be dads, and dads who happened to be Asian American. While one or another part of who we were might come to the fore on the blog at any given time, they were all integral parts of who we were. So, while we expected it, it was still frustrating to deal with commenters who said things like, “I thought this was a blog about parenting, what’s with all this race stuff?” When Anti-Racist Parent launched, I wrote about how, contrary to popular belief, racism is a parenting issue. When it comes down to it, I notice when issues of race, racism, and diversity are raised in the parentblogosphere, or when parents of color are blogging (even when it has nothing to do with race) because it’s still an exception, because it’s noticeable.

Thinking about issues of blogger diversity after the Blogher session on inclusion and exclusion, Mocha Momma wrote:

That brings up another question as well: why aren’t the Top Bloggers people of color? Where is the Black/Hispanic/Asian/Indian Dooce? Is there a mommyblogger (I think I will just pick on stick with that one genre for the moment to make a point) of color who is considered an “expert”? The reason I ask this has to do with a question someone posed to me in a private email (which, as you’ll realize, needs to be out in the open here so I’m repeating it).

Are you a mommyblogger?

Well, that was rather pointed. I mean, it reads “Mocha MOMMA” on my address bar and my banner. To be fair I have children. They aren’t the focus of everything I write about so does that make me less of a mom?

No. Not at all.

What’s my point? That it matters that we’re here. Whether we’re talking explicitly about how race and difference affect our lives as parents and the lives of our loved ones or not, it matters. Does anyone besides me care that the woman behind Motherhood Uncensored, Cool Mom Picks, the Parent Bloggers Network, and The Mominatrix is a hapa mom? Maybe not, but it matters to me. Does anyone else notice that the mastermind behind ParentHacks is a South Asian American woman? Or that the dad behind Thingamababy is a partner in an interracial marriage and the father of a biracial child? Or not only notice but appreciate that there’s an Asian American on the crew at Dadcentric or that there’s not one but two black dads with The Blogfathers (not to mention an out gay dad)? Or a Latino dad writing for Neal Pollack’s parenting humor blogzine? Or Asian American moms blogging for Parenting or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer?

That’s not even to get into the sustenance and energy I get from blogs like Rice Daddies, Kimchi Mamas, Filipina Moms, Our Kind of Parenting, Anti-Racist Parent, and the blogs of all the contributors and regular commenters on these sites who are unafraid to say yes, this shit matters, for us, and for our children, and let’s talk about it.

On BlogRhet, a site that is “a discussion space that reflects on the practice of blogging itself, especially as it pertains to questions of community, citizenship, and identity,” blogger Tere writes of feeling a strange sense of exclusion as a Latina momblogger reading the mainstream of the momosphere:

The second reason for my prevailing sense of exclusion is by far a more important one to me…. And that is the fact that I am a minority; and that, more than anything, perpetuates this feeling - even in places where I have been included.

If you doubt it (or, do you even think about it?), let me confirm it for you: the mommy blogging community is white. And I am not. At least, not as a general cross-section of Americans define "white". I am white in race but Hispanic in culture. And that makes me not white - at least to anyone who is not like me (I use the term "white" and "regular Americans" to mean white Anglos and basically, what has always been considered the majority in this country)….

[…]

And while blogging has opened my world in so many ways, it has also made me feel quite alienated at times. It has underscored just how different I am. And it's frustrating. I mean, I read some things that are completely foreign to me. Like, I can't wrap my head around it. And then I check the comments out, and everyone's agreeing, and I'm just floored….

Obviously, this is not intentional exclusion. But it is a kind of exclusion nonetheless. It is my feeling that the MB world-at-large is predominantly made up of white women. Few are the African-American women, the Hispanic ones, the Asian ones, etc. Of course, this ties to questions of privilege; and the assumption is that white, in many ways, equals privilege. But there are plenty of African-American, Hispanic and Asian families that are educated, wealthy and just as privileged as white ones (to name the top minority groups in the U.S., but certainly this is can be true of all minority groups). I have made an effort to find blogs (specifically, MBs) by minorities. And they're out there, but not as many as I wish there were, and certainly not in numbers that would drive the point home that we're here and living and loving and have just as much to offer as anyone else. This dearth of minority-voice blogs is another topic unto itself, but for the purposes of inclusion or exclusion, I have to ask, where are the minorities as far as commenting in MBs? I mean, yeah, you don't comment on a blog by first announcing your ethnicity, but there is a void of comments and conversation from women (and mothers) from the perspective of a minority voice.

Is this just me? Do any minorities who read MBs ever feel like, "WTF? I so can't relate"? Does anyone else feel sometimes that the mommy blog world is a microcosm of the United States, where white voices lead and prevail and there seems little room for minorities? And where these white voices seemingly have little to no experiences beyond their white world?

[…]

The exclusion of the mom blog world of minorities is simply one based on ignorance. You cannot address, or include, that which you do not know. It is true of me in the reverse. But as the minority here, I can't help but see it as a disadvantage….

That’s what we’re talking about here, at the root, not advertising dollars or even readership stats, but acknowledged presence in this community we’ve already called our own, acknowledgement of our diversity and our issues, of our part in all of this. So that there are no more “surprises” like the “White PTA” fiasco on Silicon Valley Moms, with some folks wondering why others were so upset. So that when someone, say, a newbie parentblogger of color, or even a PR flack, reads a piece on Babble’s Strollerderby decrying the treatment of bloggers of color, they don’t have a forced moment of cognitive dissonance when they glance over at the bios of the resident bloggers.

After watching the fallout from this year’s momblogger panel at the nation’s premier event for women bloggers, I can only hope that any parenting-focused events at next year’s planned Blogging While Brown conference feel more like home for folks like us.

...and now for something completely different...

2007-08-09T18:45:00.000-07:00

ah, summer. sweet, humid, vapid summer…season of sunny delight. if all our cultural, seasonal stereotypes marched off to high school together, summer’d get to be head cheerleader.

except this summer has been kicking my ass like some kind of sadistic personal trainer, instead. without me even getting a single toned ab in the process.

our household is emerging from an entire month of miserableness and poxplagues and coughing the night away. i’m working the full forty-plus hours a week for the first time since oh, about 1998, and full-blast, since the project i manage was three months late getting funded and still needs to be ready to launch in schools come September…plus there’s this impish wee boy who comes home every evening and has learned something new and i’m smitten and need some full-blast left to go to the park after supper and make sure he doesn’t actually eat those whiteboard markers he so enjoys extricating from my bag. and everyone i know, plus their dog, has come to visit over the past three weeks.

what i’ve seen of summer basically amounts to a few evening promenades, about three mosquito bites, and an attempted trip to the beach that resulted in me trying to Febreze the scent of Oscar’s vomit out of the back of the car. the rest? has been spent frantically juggling.

i don’t know how to stretch myself a whole lot further. i am a haggard poster child for “needs a summer vacation.”

but if i had five or ten straight days off, to bask in sunbeams and drink mojitos, what would i likely do? (other than get my child to the beach with a sandpail and Gravol, of course). i’d spend it on the internet, catching up on all the conversations and life changes i’ve missed while summer’s been holding me captive from my online community.

yep. if i could save time in a bottle, dear internets, i’d huddle inside with my laptop and spend it with you.

now, culturally, that desire represents a heinous abomination.

because summer is the time to unplug. in pop culture, summer seems to signify some glorious release space from the grind of everyday life…it’s carefree time, outdoor time, relaxing time, all set to some Beach Boys song or the soundtrack from Grease. and it’s eternally sunny, but without humidity or skin cancer. this version of summer doesn’t have rain. it’s a simulacra, a copy of a cultural childhood memory that never really existed in the first place except in pastiche, all the best pieces from a hundred zillion sources, distilled…but that only makes it more powerful. i may never, ever, in my life have spent a summer wiping the sand from my browning shoulders at a cottage by a lake…but i still hearken to the siren song of that image. and i can still smell the suntan lotion on my imaginary skin and covet the freedom to do that much nothing with my day.

and yet…and yet…the idea of going unplugged for a week makes me shudder.

because much as i wouldn’t mind pulling the plug on the work email for awhile, and could live happily without deadlines, no number of umbrella drinks by a pool or glassy waterskiing surfaces can replace the play i get to revel in out here in the blogosphere, websurfing. this girl, in reality, can only handle so much sand in the crack of her bathing suit, and nothing bores me faster than lying in the sun wondering if my pasty flesh shouldn’t get covered, already.

the cultural fantasy of summer is built on the premise that trading routine for some version of sun-drenched reclining and pampering is the ultimate in relaxation. if that vision did once reflect the dream of us teeming masses, it may need some reinvention, and soon.

because my new Summer 2.0 fantasy model involves a cottage with wireless. while i’d love to be freed from the regular grind of work and laundry and traffic so i could check out shells on a beach with Oscar for a week, and watch the stars come out and build bonfires and practice my breaststroke, part of what it means to me to ‘relax’, now, is to commune with you all. to enter this virtual room of my own, and track an infinite number of stories. if i had infinite time to comment and engage and pontificate and giggle, too…whilst reclining in a hammock with an icy pina colada? i might think i’d died and gone to heaven.

but Oscar? yeh. um. see, i want him to come to this fantasy cottage without too many electronic games or DVDs or whatever plugged-in gadgets and necessities his older self might deem necessary in this fantasy world of summers-t0-come-where-i-actually-get-a-vacation. yeh. double standard. but there’s a whole world of nature out there to discover, you know?!? sigh.

what does “unplugged” mean to you? is it an unnatural state only tolerated due to the power outages following summer lightning storms? or would you retreat to a cabin by the sea for months at a time if you could, and eschew electricity for the beauties of nature alone? do you think there’s a sea change coming in what it means, culturally, to relax? does ‘getting away from it all’, for you, involve getting away from teh internets too?

what’s the longest you’ve ‘unplugged’ for over the past couple of years?

Race & Ethnicity: It Matters

2007-08-06T13:35:00.000-07:00

I have, no kidding, about 12 posts sitting in draft mode. Everything from my review of a product to some randomness about an ex-boyfriend.

But I can't get to work on any one of them because they all seem so frivolous to me today. I've spent my morning muddled in something deeper, something that is ever-present whenever I'm perusing the blogosphere. Today, the pressing thought on my mind is race and ethnicity. And while everything is a jumble in my head right now, I feel a need to get these thoughts about there, to process it all, to join the conversation and say a few words on behalf of the Hispanic side of the blogosphere (Hispanic side, mind if I speak for you? Thanks!).

People. Gente. I don't want to tell you (again) that my hyphenated identity makes me feel left out in a community that is largely white. Because while this is still true, it is less true now than it was just weeks ago. The parenting blogging community has been (hopefully, rightfully) turned on its head after one of the panels at this year's BlogHer Conference (wherein Mocha Momma and CityMama raised very important questions of race, diversity and marketing in the parenting blog world).

One of the thoughts that's been rolling around in my head is the idea that race is invisible or non-noticeable on the blogosphere (this began with my inclusion/exclusion post at BlogRhet but has been expressed elsewhere). On one hand, I get it. I want you to see me as "Tere" - mother, wife, writer, all-around interesting human being. I want you to read me and email me and be my friend regardless of whether I'm white or olive or bi-cultural or speak English with a distinctive "Miami accent". On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that only white people don't see color because well, they don't have to. When you're the majority and part of the race that dictates what's "normal", race isn't much of an issue to you personally. That's not to say that I've lived my life solely through the lens of being Hispanic (because let's face it: in Miami, I'm in the majority and it's white Anglos who are minorities), but I am well aware that, outside of South Florida, in person, that is what jumps out first, and that is what "marks" me, far and above anything else.

How does this translate in a medium like the Internet? I get why people would read someone else's site and not attribute a race or ethnic identity to them. I mean, even as someone who is proud of her Cuban heritage, that's not all I want you to see, nor do I feel compelled to work it into every post. So no, white people, when you say you don't see race, I'm not insulted. But I do wish you would see my ethnicity and recognize the monumental role it plays in making me me. And, just as I feel lost sometimes because of cultural differences, I am, in many ways, just like you. And whether you believe it or not, whether it's has or hasn't occurred to you, you have as much to learn from me as I have to learn from you.

At the same time (paradoxically so?), race doesn't *matter* to me inasmuch as determining whom I will read. It is not the sole reason I would read someone; I need good substance to read a blog regularly. I greatly enjoy blogs by minorities - the voices they bring, the perspective they offer. I see a reflection of myself there sometimes, a recognition. But in looking for good content, and for content that I can relate to, race ultimately doesn't matter. Go figure. It's something I'm still trying to make sense of myself, even as I write it.

This issue has spun a tangent about marketing (or rather, the lack of it) to minority parents. And yeah, it's true: PR folks and companies don't hit up overtly ethnic blogs/bloggers. I can't begin to guess the reasons for this (oh, I could: ignorance, cluelessness about different cultures, misguided notions about particular ethnic groups), but it's been pointed out that marketers care mainly about hitting blogs that have high traffic numbers. In this regard, I think I fall somewhere in the middle, or perhaps I slipped through the cracks. I get a good number of pitches, many of which are irrelevant to me or what I write about. And as you can see on my sidebar, I'm now a member of the BlogHerAds network (which, I'll admit, I thought was only for very high-traffic sites). I don't know what the perception is on the marketer's end. Do they know I'm Hispanic? Do they care? Do they know that my traffic numbers are pathetic compared to the popular mom bloggers?

My attitude about this is that I'm happy to review products (and therefore provide free PR) for companies/things I would really use (but not anything else). I'm flattered that I'm "noticed". But you know, I would love to be contacted, to be asked my opinion and for reviews, to have advertising on my site, precisely because I am Hispanic. I would love for my ethnicity to be a highlight, a reason for - anything. Like Mocha Momma asked, where indeed is the Black/Hispanic/Asian/Indian Dooce?

The general question seems to be: does race matter in the blogosphere? The wonderful part is that bloggers of color are taking the issue head-on. For me, for this Cubanita, it does matter. I want you to know me as I am, as I see myself. I want you to expand your horizons and get to know people who are different, even as you make your way through the delicate topic of race and culture. I want to be part of a larger parenting/blogging community without feeling like my ethnicity is ignored or unimportant simply because the majority doesn't quite know how to address it.

I have found the best summation of my own feelings in what Julie wrote today, and I take her words to reflect my thoughts:

"Because while I don't think another person's race ought to matter to me, in my assessment of them, it can matter to them in how they feel a part of the world and therefore I ought to respect that, especially if they ask me to consider it as part of my understanding of them as an individual. I ask the same. My racial experiences are a part of me, too, and have affected how I view race, racial issues, and culture. Where I come from, the place and the people, affect who I am and how I perceive things, as well as my beliefs. I think this rings true for all of us, regardless."

There's more to be said on this topic. Other bloggers are asking good questions for this conversation to expand upon. I'll be tackling these as time allows and as my thoughts cohere.

What I Write is Mine, Isn't It? Blogging, Intellectual Property, and Identity

2007-08-02T11:56:00.001-07:00

Hello my name is Rachael and I used to write at CrankMama. I started CrankMama on a lark in August 2006, wanting an outlet for all my naughty dark lusty and sassy mama thoughts. I was dying for somewhere to express the millions of ways I was not, could not ever be Donna Reed, could not ever *not* swear around my kids, cook a reasonably tasty meal, stay at home without meaningful work, give up a fabulous sex life, leave aside 100% of my own ego for my children. I was drowning in spiritual suburbia, and CrankMama was my express train to midtown Manhattan with a pocket full of cash and a brain full of daring.

My computer, anthropomorphized and worshipped, cuddled more than my husband, was my instrument of adventurous warfare on vanilla mommyhood everywhere. My solution for sleepless worry, my nascent feminism and amorous curiosities found an outlet.

As it grew bigger, I became known (albeit only to a few) as CrankMama, which was perfectly fine with me, and this persona of a sassy, shit-kicking potty-mouthed mama developed, at once more than and less than me.

But here's the rub (and the clumsy hard, repetitive kind without lube), like many women writers, I lacked confidence in my abilities as a writer. I was comfortable "only" being a blogger because it seemed so much less risky than claiming to be a writer (if you say you're a writer and they ask where and you say "a blog" you just sit there waiting for the laughter). I was chicken. I was shucking and jiving the sisterhood I claimed to defend.

So I partnered with two other women. One would design the site, one would figure out the technical end of things (this was before I realized that Wordpress is as easy to use as a call girls' black book to find a Republican Senator).

One year later, the partners began requiring more and more meetings, discussion of products, and finally a contest about which I just couldn’t get lubed up. Now I like some beautiful men and I like some sweet creative contests. I also love objectifying men because it’s a reversal of power that is so delicious it belongs in a pie. But I did not love this contest at all.

And besides, after a year of all of this, I had become a writer. I was willing to hold my head up (even while superstitiously crossing fingers behind my back) and say out loud "I'm a writer. I write at CrankMama." And what I wrote there was powerful (for me), personal, full of confession, love and adoration, and stories of my children.

And this personal thing wasn’t business enough for my partners. Too personal, too connected with me as a person and on from there. It took only a couple of silly tear-filled (mine) meetings for me to realize that life is too short to fight over a blog.

So rather than stay and fight I left. And started Redsy.

Do I have any rights over all the material I wrote during that 12 months? According to my former partners, my rights aren't exclusive. I partnered with them on a venture that morphed into quite something more than I bargained for. But surely this is how these things often happen? They change beyond recognition and certain of the original founders want out? Who keeps the goods when the shop changes hands?

More importantly (and apropos to BlogHer last week) am I still CrankMama?

The problems of intellectual property are complex because how does one begin to define what is one's own idea? Ones own material? If I had stayed and fought it out, I would have had a strong argument. I wrote every single post for a year.

But what does it mean when someone doesn't steal your property exactly because you gave it to them at first and then wanted it back?

The deeper issues here are those related to the trouble (and glory) involved with being a woman, a mother, an artist, a writer. "Who am I?" easily morphs into "What am I worth?"

If you came to me and described that someone was keeping your website up that you had written and was attempting to cash in on your efforts, I'd hop a plane and meet you in a pub, scratch pad in hand ready to write-out our fighting script. I’d hold up signs that say “Let’s get those fuckers!” I’d put your head in my lap and pet you to sleep. But I just can’t fight that way for myself. I can’t. And I’m no shrinking Violet.

What we create on our blogs is our own intellectual property. But if it's personal and political and confessional and confrontational, if it's from our hearts, it is so difficult to fight it out. Like splitting a child in two or staying to watch one of those horrid bullfights to the end. I'm too inside the whole thing. It's too personal.

So this is what I’ll do. I’ll weave a tale, share my story. And as a result, this burden will blow away on the wind. And you can build me some lovely voodoo dolls, and we can share a drink and a laugh. And all will be well again.

Does Blogging Help You as a Writer?

2007-07-31T10:53:00.000-07:00

"Enter the writing process with a childlike sense of wonder and discovery. Let it surprise you."

Charles Ghigna

You know, a lot of bloggers have asked themselves (or their readers) this question a lot. Why do I blog? I know why I started blogging. I know why I blog now, it’s the disconnect between the two brings me here today.

I believe this to be true: writers write. We’ve all heard it, some of us live it, but I’m sure we’d be surprised at the number of people who fancy themselves a writer yet rarely take the time to sit down and engage. Perhaps perfectionism kicks in and they think that if they can’t sit down and clack away until a few pages of the next Great [Your Country Here] novel is created, why bother?

I have stories inside me waiting for their release. I know they’re there. So when I figured out how to create a blogger account (one night back in December, in a fantastic example of Putting Off Important Things - in that case gift wrapping and a trip I was loathe to take) I thought, this will be the most important tool in my toolbox. I would blog. I would write. Maybe I would post chapters, snippets of my stories in the blog.

It wasn’t until several months later that I fully succumbed to the pull of blogging, when I began writing every day. At first I wrote for me. Then for the maybe three or four friends I knew were reading. Then I discovered several great blogs, and started leaving comments (something I had never in the past done before, even though I’ve been reading a blog or two for the past three years). Then, through the blog labyrinth built by commenters and blogrolls, I found myself bookmarking thirty or so blogs, reading them, joining in on memes and linking to posts that touched me.

Without quite realizing it, I had woven myself into the outskirts of a community. I liked it. A lot. Although I stay at home with my kids, I’m far from isolated. I volunteer, I have book clubs and girlfriends and dinner clubs. But each day, when I’m home with the kids, and the phone hasn’t rang and I’m quietly going about my day, I feel a pang reminding me that I’m a social creature who craves the company of others, most especially women. I treasure my friendships, even more so as the years slip away, because I realize how rare and special each true bond is. And somehow, I’ve started to form these alliances inside the blogging world. Based on the blogs I read, comment on, and those who visit my site, I have found an astounding network of women (and the occasional man). I still feel like the girl let in to the cool sorority by accident, who marvels at the company she gets to keep.

But the tool? What about the tool? As a writer, blogging has given me a gift: it has forced me into regular, consistent writing. But. But. I do not pain myself over my word choice when I blog. I do not write, delete, write, delete, reconstruct and agonize over structure, dialogue, or where things are going. I just write. It’s not very graceful. I do put thought into my writing, but it is more stream of consciousness than Chapter Ten.

Last week I started taking time to write outside of my blog. I figured enough was enough and I needed to work on that story that would ~~get me on the Today Show~~ maybe be published someday. Was it easier, because my writing muscles are flexed, stretched and exercised most days of the week? Um. No. In fact, it was painful. I was not writing to elicit a giggle from my readers, or to pose a question maybe a dozen kind souls would take the time to answer. I wasn’t writing a meme, or linking to anyone. I was writing for me. For my inner critic, and for the nameless array of faces all stamped “Editor’s Assistant Who Will Put This in The Slush Pile.” It was painful. But I kept on. I don’t think I can go back and read what I’ve written each night, but it's saved on my computer and there for future tweaking. I know it will never be posted. I would no more post examples of my book on my blog than pictures of my children with their home address. I know that some bloggers do this. They talk about their book progress, they post snippets, they elicit feedback. I can’t imagine. Not only for the obvious reason of internet plagiarism and copy writing issues, but because I would feel naked. Naked while bending over and opening a tough jar of pickles.

I think that in order for me to find my rhythm with writing something outside of the blog, I will need to practice that dance, separate from my blogger moves. For me, blogging is a most spectacular warm-up with a group of friends. But in order to write, I need to go run down that trail alone. Thank God I need to warm up most days.

How about you? Does blogging help you as a writer? Does it define you as a writer? I’d really love to know.