On Blogging the Personal

Maybe my rhetorical proclivities are coming to the forefront, but I have a bit of a problem with some of the academic blogs I've looked at from academicblogs.net. (I should note that, for decorum's sake, I'm not going to link to the blogs in question.) My problem is with blogs that by and large serve as personal journals (which, of course, is in keeping with the general definition of many blogs) while going under the rubric of being academic. Imagine a blog (and I'm being mostly hypothetical here) where the blogger spends most of his/her time blogging about life as a graduate student. This might seem all well and good, until/unless the posts end up being rants about job market anxieties, dissertation woes, and the like. To what extent is this adding to a body of knowledge? Is this (or should the be) the goal of a so-called academic blog?

If we're thinking pedagogically, and if our goal is to engage students with new media composing practices, then having them simply use blogs as sites for personal journaling seems besides the point--and it seems like such a classroom strategy would return us to an Elbow-esque expressivist rhetoric that won't really serve students all that well. After all, arent many students already doing this kind of work on their own, whether on their own full-fledged blogs or else in short form on Facebook or Twitter?

Now, check out a couple alternatives that don't ask us to divest ourselves of personal investment in the service of intellectual engagement:

Consider Scott Eric Kaufman's blog Acephalous. Monday's post deals with the ethics of reading comics given the processes of "closure" (Scott McCloud's term) that might implicate students in, for example, a murder. Textual interpretation, pedagogy: this is certainly an academic piece. But, consider his post "Damnable confabulation." Here we have a writer struggling with his own processes of memory, specifically the visual memory of a car accident that he couldn't possibly, objectively remember. Personal? Certainly. Academic? It seems so. For example, he writes:

My brain did the math. It calculated what must have happened between the time I last saw the car in my mirror and where it landed and then turned that understanding of what must have happened into a memory of having witnessed it happen. So even though I couldn't have seen the crash occur, I'm burdened by a nightmare-inducing memory of it. Intellectually, I know this to be the result of garden-variety non-pathological confabulation, indicative of nothing more than the procedural drills required to produce an unbroken experience of consciousness; emotionally and ethically, however, it feels wrong to bear witness to a tragedy that I did not, in fact, witness.

In short, Kaufman seems to be wrestling with his personal experience, but also with the nature of perception and memory; we might even say that the personal experience and the abstract conceptual questions exist in a kind of dialectical relationship here. Closer analysis might reveal, too, some kind of epistemic rhetoric at work here (at minimum, I'd say clearly he's not working under the rubric of epideictic). And it doesn't hurt that he uses Gertrude Stein as a touchstone for the post.

Or, briefly, consider Tim Lindgren's Kairos piece "Defining Place Blogging." In the process of exploring place blogs, he writes, "For them, the most pressing concern is, 'In what ways can blogging help foster a deeper sense of place and encourage reflection on the relationship between place and identity?'" Again, these kinds of blogs might not be completely participating in the culture of academia, but we can see them engaging the public in an intellectually rigorous way. I'm not sure if this falls outside the scope of my archive, but it's thoought-provoking at minimum.