As I read Christian Kohl et al, I could not help but to
start connecting the discussion of authors/readers (who can also be authors to
the same text) to our very own blogger hierarchical writings. My blog, for
example, is merely an extension of my analytical readings of theory for the
week and I post at the top of writer/reader/writer chain. After my post has
been submitted, the other students (reader/writers) analyze my analysis and
make their own analysis on the subject. Their comments then become a further extension
of what I had originally wrote. Thus, they have placed themselves in a position
within the hierarchical writer/reader/writer formation. If a good discussion
were to occur and each further submission to the chain were also extensions of
previous comments, we will see a somewhat similar formation to that of Wiki
documents (I will later introduce an experiment to see how this process works
on Blogger under certain constraints); Kohl explains that “in principle all
users have the same right to write to read” (Kohl 169).
As we progress further down the chain of literary events (in
our class blogger assignments), the original content is absorbed and then
transformed by each subsequent reader/writer. Kohl says, “[the] collaborative process
of writing dissolve[s] the central intention of the author” (174) Generally, these submissions transformations
are not the intent of the original author, but the writing merits new directions
and ways of thinking. In The Database and
the Essay, Johndan Johnson talks about these transformations of ideas; he
says, “like language… people can attempt to forge new connections in certain
situations; they can connect objects together in various ways to shift meanings”
(202).
The strange thing about this process is that it has a “cycle
of literary life” when used in our Blogger assignments; the original writer
becomes the reader (when reading other people’s comments) and can eventually
become the writer again, but only under the pretense of a lower position of the
literary hierarchy that was originally held by the original author. In other
words, the original writer’s concepts have been repurposed (retaining some
fragments of the original) by a new writer (the reader turned writer). The
original author has to succumb to the new writer’s direction if he/she wishes
to continue off of the new writer’s ideas. This process leaves traces of each
writer’s contribution to the discussion as an author and as a reader. Kohl says that “the writing must function in absence
of author and reader. The text as a unit carries the traces of all authors”
(174). With this in mind, the hierarchy constantly renews itself as long as
there are continued contributions to the ideas through writing comments.
I would like to take this idea and apply it to the comments
to this post. The experiment will require multiple comments and would require
each comment to feed off the previous one. In other words, there should be only
one original comment and the subsequent comments should be replies to the
previous one. In this experiment, I will comment more than once through the
chain, but I am required (as I hope everyone else will abide by) to only repurpose
the comment I have just read by rethinking and re-contributing to the chain.
Think of it as a literary game of “telephone” and enjoy the comment string!
I think that blogs and their comments do have the ability to serve as interesting chains of writing with each person acting as both a writer and a reader. If a blog post and its comments are taken as a whole, it is easy to justify the idea of a blog as a forum for the collaborative formation of ideas and pieces of writing.
ReplyDeleteI believe the difference between our blogs and written works like articles found on Wikipedia is that Wikipedia lumps all writing from different writers together as a unit. Each writer is contributing to a whole without his or her name attached and from which an outside observer would have great difficulty extracting the work of an individual writer. In contrast, each of us has personally crafted pieces of writing that remain separate when we write and comment on a blog. Our names are still attached to our writing and, although we are borrowing ideas from many others, each one of us is still in control of organizing the information and deciding how to form our posts.
I think that blogs and Wikipedia articles represent two ways of creating texts with multiple readers and writers as contributors. As readers and writers, which do you think is more effective and in what situations? Do you prefer to have your name attached to your writing, or would you rather be part of a group of unknown contributors?