Blogging is influencing communicating and the way we create and participate in community. What I think is reflected in blogs like Clancy Ratliff's is evidence that some bloggers have careers that are deeply meaningful to them and reflect an aspect of society that they want to encourage. By blending her professional interests with personal reflections in her blog Ratliff is blurring the line between them. She has been able to create a life and a career around her interests in rhetoric, technical communication, digital media and feminism. This challenges me because these are also my professional interests, although I do have other personal interests besides these.
When I first read her blog in class it blew my mind. Here was someone posting her academic reflections one day, and the next day her reflections on the challenges of being a new mother. She says in her interview with Meredith Graupner and Christine Denecker Clancy Ratliff: Blogger, Scholar ... Blogger-Scholar
Usually if someone reads your blog, it's because that person finds you interesting, and that includes your book project, your teaching, your cooking, your children, your responses to news stories, everything.
What I said in response to seeing it was, "This is why I don't blog". Because it would be hard to separate my professional life from my personal life. Ratliff is giving bloggers and potential bloggers persmission to blur the line - that it's what actually makes a blog good reading.
Other articles in this week's reading discussed whether blogging is amateur journalism, i.e. reporting and whether it's a way to self-publish. Some of the professional journalists who blog said they still keep their good-paying print gigs but blog to reflect - something they couldn't do in an article. As a journalist I was very interested in this subject. It is hard to find an editor or publication for some of the things I would like to write about. If I was blogging there would be nothing standing in my way.
1 comment:
I like the way you put into words my thoughts -- that you don't blog because it's hard to separate the personal from the public. In fact each time over the past couple of weeks that I've thought of starting a personal blogging cite, I wonder why I would ever let go of some of my secrets.
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