Via MetaFilter come the findings of Fernanda Viégas for the MIT Blog Survey. The comments to the MetaFilter post remark on the institutional boundedness of the study: indeed, Viégas acknowledges that “the results from this survey cannot be generalized to the entire blogging community; instead, these results are representative of the state of affairs in certain portions of the blogging world”. However, Viégas points towards the conclusion that “blogging is a world in flux where social norms are starting to flourish”, and offers some interesting specifics. My somewhat tangential question might be: if blogging practices are in fact culturally localized, how might we start talking about discourse communities and contact zones in relation to teaching, learning, and writing with technology? John at Jocalo has done an excellent job of pointing to how many of the discourses of composition are institutionally bound; what happens if we attempt to look at weblogging in the same way?
(Cross-posted at KairosNews, sort of to accentuate my point: lots of folks read there who don’t read here, and I suspect there may be the occasional visitor here who doesn’t read KairosNews all that often.)
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