Hyperglyphics

A new year, time for a little reflection on this whole blogging thing I started back in the summer, fresh off the high of Computers and Writing and the flush of technophilia I always feel during and immediately following that conference. Much like the students in my Web writing course, it’s apparent that blogging is easier said than done. However, I’ve always meant for this blog to be mainly for my own purposes - a place to compile notes and research - than for others. My blogging project was not to gain a loyal following or make money or break news. No, my blogging was meant to be a space for working out my own thoughts and to form a record of those thoughts that I can draw on for more formal writing projects. I also like thinking of blogging as post-process composition - writing always in the state of becoming. This is a line of thought that I’m increasingly interested in for my rhet/comp pedagogy, though it poses some challenges for anyone working in an increasingly assessment-oriented institutional atmosphere. I’m using Robert McRuer’s text Crip Theory as the theoretical foundation for a pop culture project I’m working on, but I’m drawn again and again to his chapter on composition “Composing Queerness and Disability” even though it’s not relevant for the paper. But it is relevant for my comp work and his question, “Can composition theory work against the simplistic formulation of that which is proper, orderly, and harmonius?” (147), fascinates me. Certainly composition is about putting things in order and creating a product, but McRuer suggests that we can think of composition as producing not order, but a disorder that he calls “de-composition,” drawing on that term’s connotations of disintegration and of an on-going process or progress toward another state of being. This is an idea I will be returning to frequently in the coming months, hopefully here on this blog.

Anyway, all this talk about process and composing is really just to say that I’ve found I haven’t been writing in my blog as much as I’d hoped/intended. However, what is interesting is that I seem to have adopted Twitter as a note-taking/research compiling application. As I review my tweet stream from the past several months, it’s crystal clear that Twitter is where I bookmarked articles and items of interest for future reference. It’s like a little note-taking app for me and it was a great way to share stuff with the Web writing class, although the fact that I can’t pull up the tweet stream for our hashtag is frustrating and suggests, as one of my colleagues put it, that Twitter is more interested in the now than in the past.  But I’m going to keep using Twitter this way, both with a hashtag for my class and through the new list function, because I think it’s been really good - better than a blog even - for noting stuff I want to go back to later.