Rigor Mortis

More and more often when I teach blogging, I feel like I am teaching Latin.

It seems as if blogging is now considered a discourse essentially dead in its vernacular practice, but the language of blogging still holds some recognizable pedagogical virtue as a way to build students' communication skills with public audiences and as a gateway for understanding related digital practices that might appear more demonstrably alive in the present day.

Today I found out that I will be part of a roundtable discussion titled "Is Blogging Dead? Yes, No, Other" at the Computers and Writing conference at the University of Michigan. The proposal from Steve Krause begins as follows:

In one fashion or another, the short history of blogging has always been about dismissal. Blogging has consistently been labeled a fad, discredited as little more than amateurs keeping public diaries, criticized by mainstream media for their shoddy writing (compared to the mainstream media), and so forth. And yet Rosenberg (2009) argues that blogging was “the first form of social media to be widely adopted beyond the world of technology enthusiasts,” a development that provided a “template for all the other forms that would follow” (p. 13). Blogs perforated the borders between author and audience, reporter and reader, diary and pulpit in ways that launched careers, destroyed campaigns, and illustrated, perhaps, the communal philosophy of the digital age. That said, as Facebook and Twitter have eclipsed blogs, perhaps the death of blogging has finally arrived. Perhaps the medium that showed the way has been superseded by the forms following. Or not. Or maybe it has become something else. Something other.

Of course, the news of blogging's demise is not a terribly stunning announcement. A year and a half ago, a report from the Pew Research Center announced that it was already judged an archaic practice among the young.

Yet the blogs in this quarter's digital danse macabre continue to show a certain vitality conceptually, rhetorically, stylistically, and even technically. Offerings from my students like Eat Dirt, San Diego, Greener Strides, Cinesia, Digirights, and The Social Documentary speak of students continuing desires to have their voices heard by the public. The class blog is full of suggestions for alternative lectures that I could have given with the same subject matter.

I can't imagine trying to get to know my students otherwise in a lecture hall of over two hundred souls. I may be a schoolmarm essentially drilling them on their conjugations and declensions, but at this point I don't know what else to do.