Feeling Ordinary: Blogging1

[1] For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite there being many distinctions in online journal practice. At least part of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as opposed to blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age characteristics afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).

as Conversational Scholarship

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Notes

[1] For the purposes of this paper I refer to blogging in general despite there being many distinctions in online journal practice. At least part of my motivation in avoiding mention of journaling as opposed to blogging is to discuss issues often downplayed in the gender and age characteristics afforded to each (see Gregg, forthcoming 2006a).

[2] My use of ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everyday’ are residues of the original context for this paper, the CSAA conference Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-first Century Quotidian, Murdoch University, Perth, Dec. 2004.

[3] For specific discussion of the interpellative strategies of new media commentary see Cohen (this issue). Graham Meikle (2002) describes a similar process of ‘backing in to the future’ in his Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet.

[4] For an overview of the former, see Culler and Lamb (2003). For a range of views on the public intellectual in an Australian context, see Bartoloni et al. (1997), Dessaix (1998) and more recently Carter (2004). The 1994 Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference held at the University of Technology, Sydney, also had the theme ‘Intellectuals and Communities’.

[5] Bruce Robbins (1993) notes that this is an achievement typically overlooked in debates on the politics of professionalism.

[6] And, I would add, e-mail list culture.

[7] Tim Dunlop (2003), one of Australia's most prominent ‘political’ bloggers, argues that ‘blogging has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual and citizen’. His essay is a more extensive engagement with the concerns raised by Brett's article and the idea of blogging as a public intellectual practice. ‘Rather than being in decline, as it is fashionable to suggest’, Dunlop claims that blogs show the category of public intellectual to be ‘exploding’.

[8] Comments from readers of this paper have led me to agree that one of the most sobering aspects of blogging regularly is the realization that one's audience is insular, restricted and knowable, that the idea of writing into the unknown is one of the great fallacies about everyday blogging. However, I would still want to accord a degree of power to the silent readers many blogs enjoy, and the importance of this albeit small unknown readership in shaping the urgency of address.

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Melissa Gregg

Melissa Gregg is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland. Her forthcoming book, Emotionally Invested: Cultural Studies’ Affective Voices (Palgrave, 2006), considers the significance of ‘affect’ in the writing of key cultural studies figures and its particular role in securing commitment to the academic vocation.