My Body Lies Over the Keyboard: Agency and Efficacy in Weblog Storytelling

Abstract

A series of imaginary weblog entries explores the bodily capability for storytelling in weblogs. Weblog storytelling embraces or brings together both stories and tellings. Thinking and speaking in stories is efficacious for learning what it is we want to say (the bodily capability to narrate a story, to produce the desired effect) and, at the same time, the very practice of telling stories constitutes and inscribes us as agents in power relations (the bodily capability to function as addressee and addresser: both inside the story as narrator and character, and outside the story as listener and teller). In storytelling, the weblog writer and reader “lie over the keyboard,” that is, they are caught up in a system of equivalences that transforms perception into expression and one gesture into another. Weblog storytelling relies on the agency and efficacy of bodily participation by which we respond not to the virtual but to the imaginary texture of the real.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this article were presented at the National Communication Association Convention in Boston on November 20, 2005.