I went the old school method and we brainstormed some aspects of blogs on the whiteboard. Here’s a bit of what we came up with…some of them overlap, some may be central to blogging and other peripheral, but they give a sense of some of the rhetoric of blogs. Special thanks to James Goldberg, Jeff Swift, and Gideon Burton for their thoughts.

The rhetoric of blogs:

Collaboration and interaction — in most blog platforms, comments are the norm, and it takes effort to remove them. Collaboration–developing ideas through discourse and discussion–is facilitated by these comments. Blogs admit that any communication is speaking to an audience, and interaction with that audience is encouraged. Many of the best blogs are conversational.

Visual formatting and emphasis — the visual design, the form, is an intrinsic part of the message. We even like the academic blogs that we read to be visually appealing, to have pictures and headings, to engage with us on a formal level. (Note to self: this is something I need to work on. I have only one picture in this post and bolds and italics are only marginally cool/effective.)

Length — while not nearly as short as microblogging and facebook updates, most blogs are not a long form. Often the entire post will fit on one screen, or with just a small scroll. In blogs we’re given palatable pieces of thought.

Personal nature — while there’s many genres (journals, political, satirical, academic, etc.) blogs tend to be a rather personal form of writing. We want to see the man behind the curtain, and for him to talk directly to us. Further, what you say matters and accumulates over time, helping to define your individual identity.

Conflation of author and audience — No longer is the ability to publish held only by large corporations or those with financial backing. The roles of author and audience are conflated, and we slip between them constantly.

Hyperlinks and connections — like many other types of new media, blogs take advantage of the ability to link and make connections between things.

Unpolished/in process thought – blogs celebrate unpolished thought, which sometimes can be a bad thing. But this can also be the blog’s greatest strength: we don’t have to polish something to see how an audience reacts, we don’t have to set our ideas in stone to have them worth sharing, and we become more willing to adapt our position and engage in true discourse when we recognize that the form is not about creating a permanent manifesto. To use Gideon Burton’s term, versioning is not only accepted, but encouraged.

Public spheres — blogs are one form that allow us to become involved and make a contribution in the issues that matter to our communities. By having a public blog, you join the conversations going on that determine the rules of the world we live in.

Literacy — Like with all aspects of literacy, there should be both consumption and production. Because of their accessibility, it’s quite simple to become thoughtful consumers and producers of texts.

How I use blogs in the first year composition/writing classroom:

I post class blog assignments online; students write blog posts 1-3 times a week.

Blog posts allow students to find rhetorical examples, develop their writing with the help of their peers and an audience, publish their writing, and reflect on the writing process.

Students engage in dialogue through commenting on each other’s posts and responding to those comments.

Every semester some of the specifics of what I do with blogs in the classroom change, but overall I’ve received positive feedback and more positive feedback (it still seems that students got things out of it even if they weren’t thrilled). Further, I’ve seen my students’ writing improve by leaps and bounds.

Further reading– Check out my recent article in the Locutorium journal: Opinion Editorials, New Media, and Participation in Real Public Discourse.

Yet teachers are still needed.  One key area that students need to be guided in is new media literacy, being taught to consciously think about and critically reflect on how they interact with new media.  Students can then be taught to apply this critical reflection to their own new media writing.

This post will give an example of how an interactive web space (the Star Trek website) can be analyzed using a theoretical, reflective approach to new media (Margaret Mackey’s theories of play) and then used to encourage students in developing their own new media writing.

You don’t have to be a Trekkie to appreciate the Star Trek website and its web 2.0 savvy.  Equipped with an RSS feed, click-to-play soundtrack from the film to accompany your website exploration, a number of clips from the film, and constant interactivity, the Star Trek website invites you to become part of the Star Trek world.

Margaret Mackey provides a useful lens to explore how users interact with new media texts like the Star Trek website.  In her book Literacies Across Media: Playing the Text, Mackey explores various definitions of the term play (in the spirit of Raymond Williams’ Keywords), giving eight categories for how we “play the text.”  Four of these categories are particularly relevant to analyzing the Star Trek website.

1. Playing as pretending or imagining

Margaret Mackey writes, “How do we learn about stepping into a world with an imaginary and still-open future? How do we learn to apply this switch to a new text, or a new format?” (166).

The Star Trek website equips us with all the tools we need to enter the website world. For those without past Star Trek exposure, there is an “About” page with story background and a basic synopsis.

Yet the Star Trek website also invites pretending and imagining from those familiar with the Star Trek world. The “panoramas” and the character and place dossiers are visually attractive and interactive, both inviting and teaching the user to pretend or imagine specifically in the web sphere in addition to the film sphere and TV sphere.

Imagining in the website allows us to explore a “still-open future” an online Star Trek world in which we can determine the possibilities and how we interact with all that is before us.

2. Playing as engaging with the rules of the game

Not only does the Star Trek website invite us to imagine, it quickly teaches the “rules” of online interaction in this space, both what is and is not possible, and what is and is not permissible, just as certain things are possible and permissible when you play a game of baseball.

One of the major “rules of the game” of the Star Trek website is that we are meant to have a dual level of awareness, a dual level of interaction.  Right next to the “dossiers” of major characters and places-presented as if dossiers from the fictional world-are “production notes” which include filmmaker thoughts on casting, filming certain scenes.  We are supposed to engage with the characters on a deepness comparable to engaging with real life stories, and yet we are supposed to know all the time that this is just a movie, and a movie’s website.

3. Playing as performing

When we perform, we are not only pretending in order to interpret the text. We become involved on a very physical and emotional level in our engagement, in our “play” as we act out various roles.

The games page is an obvious example of physical performance; for example, as you play “Race to Destiny” your body has physical reactions—movement, muscle tension, etc.—in response to things encountered on the digital racecourse.

The site offers opportunities to perform Star Trek identities offsite, providing downloadable user icons. By blogging with a picture of James Kirk or Uhura as your icon, you are performing (and creating) a different identity emotionally (for both you and those you interact with) than if you used your own picture.

4. Playing as fooling around

The Star Trek website allows you to “fool around” or in other words, to experiment with possibilities.  By clicking on different ship hallways or using the “Navigate” menu we explore the movie website world at our own pace, in our own order, testing and trying the different functions to see what interests and engages us without being constrained by a set or pre-planned arrangement.  There is no easy beginning-middle-end “reading” method like with a traditional print texts, and being able to explore without these traditional constraints gives our mind new options, new possibilities, helping us think in original ways and make new connections.

Classroom Application:

Applying a complex theory like Margaret Mackey’s to something students already engage with (like the Star Trek website) helps them understand the theories surrounding new media and also to think critically about the online processes they engage with on a daily basis.

As always, the next step is to help students apply it to their own “online writing,” their own writing creations.  In a new media project I might assign a written reflection, worth 25 of the 100 points, in which the students address the following (based off of Mackey’s categories):

• New types of online texts teach you how to actively play and pretend in their worlds. What in your text invites users familiar and unfamiliar with its elements to participate, play, and “pretend”?
• All texts have rules. What are the rules of your text that an audience would have to engage with to have a successful experience with your text? How will they know what these rules are without them being explicitly stated?
• Performance creates an added level of participation on the part of your reader. What opportunities do your readers have to perform, to participate either in different physical or emotional roles, with your text?
• Some of the best online texts allow the viewer to choose how they will explore or “read” the text, allowing them to make decisions and create new meaning. What about the design of your text/project gives choices to your viewers? How might they create new meaning through your text?

Some of these may seem intuitive to your students-if they’ve created a video to upload on youtube, then the rules of the texts will have been acquired by their viewers spending time on youtube watching other videos.  Yet whether the explanations are obvious or not, reflection helps them to think critically, and create better material in the future.

In and of themselves, Margaret Mackey’s theories are unhelpful to students.  Yet if students are shown how the theory works in action, and then are invited to apply it to their own work, they will not only learn a lot about what makes good new media writing, but they will also become critically-thinking new media writers.