on anonymity and blogging by Hilary

this is great!


Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:58:11 -0400
From: HILARY WARD
Subject: Re: pedagogy
To: 6010@LISTS.WAYNE.EDU

Renuka, I'd like to respond to your thoughts about anonymity
with some reflections based in the experience I had setting
up a blog for this course.

I discovered that I couldn't get "into" my new blog the way
that I am "into" the blog I created as part of the class
assignment for Winter term.

However, I couldn't see myself
posting "professionally"
on my real blog, which had gotten abandoned and then taken
up again as part of a literary "electronic memoir" project
between me and 3 friends at U of M.

Finally, I resolved the problem by replacing all the names
of peopleandcolleaguesandfriendsand peopleIfightwith and
peopleIhavecrushes on with 1 name: Name deleted.  (I deleted
a few posts where peoples' identities are obvious even if I
withhold their names).

Then, I added a post about the blog as a literary
autobiography, or memoir.

The blog is now appropriate for a
wider audience.

The decision had 2 interesting consequences that directly
relate to your post:
1)   your post talks about how identities get multiplied
through digital media.  And identities don't just get
multiplied when refracted through, um, the digital.  They
also get blurred, smudged, narrowed down, switched around
and deleted.

There are only 2 characters left on the blog: me and Name
deleted.  It's interesting how that minor revision shifts
the emphasis of all the posts on the blog toward an
exasperating literary abstraction.

2) Because my blog has already been pre-written as a
literary autobiography memoir, my blogged responses to the
readings can only be literary (to keep the spirit of the
project).  So by responding to the texts within the literary
environment of my blog, the authors of the essays become
fictional characeters in my everyday life, availiable for
dialogue, adventures and coffee.

Kurt Spellmyer has been rewritten as a student in my English
1020 class.