what happened
I've come home to find the scream in full tilt, and I've missed so many fantastic events. I've been experiencing them vicariously mostly through angela's blog: here, here, and here
and here.
but also through alexandria bamford, whom I first heard and met at the last lex, and whose blog(s)(here and here) many of us have been reading with great interest because of their generous attention, detail and thought.
so i was interested to pick up on a question about blog reportage and the responsibility of the blog reporter, and the blog audience, as it related to the herpoetics event. i banged on about it at length in the comments box over there, but I'm going to repost my comments here, cause it does underscore for me the importance of rethinking how I teach students to interpret what they read, which will be a project for august.
"i've been hearing a number of people make comments similar to mark, a certain wariness about how an event will be represented in blogland, or other forms of diy media, and, while i understand the concern, I think that once again, this newish form of technology is only revealing something that has been going on for a long time in other contexts. for example, I just went to read the new york times book reviews, and saw that in the opening lines of the e-mail digest which i receive, a certain book got panned, so I scrolled past to look at the other offerings. I let a review determine my personal judgment of the book as not being worthy to compete for my limited reading attention. but it wasn't just any review. it was a review from a source I trust, and whose particular biases are somewhat known to me. if the toronto sun had panned the book, i might immediately go out and buy a copy.
events are always going to be shaped or re-shaped by a variety of filters. even being there in person doesn't mean that you will have a pure experience of what happened, because there's no such thing. a prior experience with an individual author, or with feminism, or with panel discussions, will be enough to have one person come away from the herpoetics event with a very different sense of what happened than someone else.
one important difference for how these things get taken up in blogland versus traditional reporting is that in addition to the near-instananeous reportage, blog encourage near-instantaneous response and dialog, through comments, but also through other posts. if someone feels that they have been unfairly misrepresented, it's just as easy for them to post a reply or start their own blog.
and i think it's only a certain kind of naive readership who will take what is posted on a blog as a pure representation of what happened. other readers will filter what's being said through who's saying it, and that will be part of what informs their interpretation of the post and the event.
don't get me wrong- i think that that kind of naive readership is probably in the majority in the general population. But that's a problem with how hermeneutics is taught, and I'm doing all I can in the trenches to solve that one in my own small corner! But in a population of poets and critics and critical thinkers, a certain degree of interpretive sophistication should, i would argue, be taken for granted, and if it isn't, that's not the fault of the blogger. we should know better."
and here.
but also through alexandria bamford, whom I first heard and met at the last lex, and whose blog(s)(here and here) many of us have been reading with great interest because of their generous attention, detail and thought.
so i was interested to pick up on a question about blog reportage and the responsibility of the blog reporter, and the blog audience, as it related to the herpoetics event. i banged on about it at length in the comments box over there, but I'm going to repost my comments here, cause it does underscore for me the importance of rethinking how I teach students to interpret what they read, which will be a project for august.
"i've been hearing a number of people make comments similar to mark, a certain wariness about how an event will be represented in blogland, or other forms of diy media, and, while i understand the concern, I think that once again, this newish form of technology is only revealing something that has been going on for a long time in other contexts. for example, I just went to read the new york times book reviews, and saw that in the opening lines of the e-mail digest which i receive, a certain book got panned, so I scrolled past to look at the other offerings. I let a review determine my personal judgment of the book as not being worthy to compete for my limited reading attention. but it wasn't just any review. it was a review from a source I trust, and whose particular biases are somewhat known to me. if the toronto sun had panned the book, i might immediately go out and buy a copy.
events are always going to be shaped or re-shaped by a variety of filters. even being there in person doesn't mean that you will have a pure experience of what happened, because there's no such thing. a prior experience with an individual author, or with feminism, or with panel discussions, will be enough to have one person come away from the herpoetics event with a very different sense of what happened than someone else.
one important difference for how these things get taken up in blogland versus traditional reporting is that in addition to the near-instananeous reportage, blog encourage near-instantaneous response and dialog, through comments, but also through other posts. if someone feels that they have been unfairly misrepresented, it's just as easy for them to post a reply or start their own blog.
and i think it's only a certain kind of naive readership who will take what is posted on a blog as a pure representation of what happened. other readers will filter what's being said through who's saying it, and that will be part of what informs their interpretation of the post and the event.
don't get me wrong- i think that that kind of naive readership is probably in the majority in the general population. But that's a problem with how hermeneutics is taught, and I'm doing all I can in the trenches to solve that one in my own small corner! But in a population of poets and critics and critical thinkers, a certain degree of interpretive sophistication should, i would argue, be taken for granted, and if it isn't, that's not the fault of the blogger. we should know better."
posted by happenin fish at 10:22 AM
4 Comments:
I'll repost my comment to Alixandra's blog here:
The beginnings of some thoughts in response:
First, to be completely forthright: my weariness is coming more or less directly from my shock at, and subsequent disillusionment about, the lack of sophistication in the way in which a particular recent event was shaped through electronic communication. I saw a quick reaction that seemed to draw relatively innocent parties in with little discrimination, and I saw a hermeneutically rich (if disturbing) event--an event that might have proved an opportunity for better understanding of real problems--unintentionally reduced to an opportunity for declarations of allegiance and blacklisting. The effects are of this shaping are ongoing. Recently, I saw one of the (admittedly often offensive) actors banned from the comments field of a U.S. poet's blog with the words "I know who you are." Perhaps I'm overly sensitive, but I find the "know" in that sentence chilling in its presumption and judgment. Someone else just "outed" a listserv and explicitly made accusations of guilt by association.
I fully appreciate the fact that events are always shaped and filtered. But blogs, we must realize, are powerful institutions and they're kept and read by people with varying degrees of clout in the literary community. (Blogs also frequently serve a PR function in their projection of personas and their filtering of information, and in their forging and maintenance of relationships and allegiances.) In practice, they tend to encourage the quick processing of current events before newer ones are attended to. Few readers have the time to engage the finer points. People do read blogs to find out "what happened," and, again practically speaking, they usually have few accounts to choose from. Comments fields and lists seem to replicate the dynamics of community (both its support and richness and its regulation and coercion) in accelerated form.
Also, I think it's worthwhile wondering whether we're losing the possibility of ephemeral interaction. A friend recently told me that she's very much aware that anything she says at a literary event could be blogged about and that she's found herself holding back in conversation as a result.
Some thoughts,
Mark
i do see where you're coming from, mark. i'm equally wary, however, of a kind of crippling self- censure on the part of bloggers who want to document events. and i still think that there's plenty of opportunity for increasing the complexity of the representation of a given event through multiple accounts.
i'm also returning to this conversation after having a week of my life documented, and put into someone else's hands to be edited as they see fit for a reality television show. my words and actions will be, no doubt, decontextualized, and recontextualized in a space where there is no opportunity for me to respond with an alternate version of the story.
maybe i'll feel differently when i see the show, but right now I feel like misrepresentation & misinterpretation is just an aspect of any life lived in public, and blogs only accelerate this.
the question of ephemerality is also interesting- i've often felt that blogs are like a commodification of experience. do you feel the same way about taking photos of an event?
I don't mean to sound anti-blog or anti-documentation. Some thoughts though:
Crippling self-censure: I guess self-censure can mean many things, but I wonder whether discomfort before writing or speaking is always a bad thing. Such feelings are likely a symptom of working within the social sphere (and here I'd like to tentatively point to a distinction between community and society). Crippling self-censure? Yes, probably bad. Hesitation and nervousness about writing or speaking publicly? It seems to me that this implies awareness of the possibility of disagreement, criticism, or ill-effect, which, whether we like it or not, is real. (And I think this possibility is a good thing.) It might also suggest that the speaker or writer is saying something as opposed to repeating cliches to the already-converted.
Photos: I think photos have markedly different aspirations toward comprehensiveness than an account of an event or a review of it (not to suggest that the latter aspire toward absolute comprehensiveness). We often use the term "snapshot" to suggest incompleteness. (As a sidenote, I've been really interested lately in the difference between how I understand photos of people I already know and those of people I don't know and subsequently meet. The before- and after-meeting understandings are usually pretty different.) Also, a lot of people tend to be nervous about or even shy away from having their photos taken at events.
Publicness: While these events certainly are public, I think people often like to reserve a little privacy within them.
Yes, please, don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that people should stop blogging about literary happenings. I just think it's a good idea to keep aware of the possibly negative aspects.
I just wanted to point out that I think my arguments are underpinned by my observation that while it would be good if each event resulted in multiple and different accounts, for whatever reasons (time, I think, is a big factor), it tends not to work out that way. I think the same can be said about participation in comments fields.
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