Computers and Composition, the standard-bearing journal for those of us who work in rhetoric and technology, has recently unveiled its new weblog, and I'll be watching with some interest.
It makes me wonder if this is the new "thing" for e-journals--when I started blogging, I talked with a couple of Enculturation folk about doing the same thing (only with our journal, obviously), but the idea died on the vine for lack of interest, or perhaps fear of long-term commitment, and I didn't really push at it. I enjoy reading MeFi, and I enjoy blogging, but there's something in-between those two activities that's represented by the kind of blog that C&C (or Kairosnews, for that matter) is doing.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, honestly, but perhaps it's that I feel a little ambivalent. The first post on the new blog was about online community, and I suppose the thinking at play here is that this will be a new site for the kind of community-building that our field is fond of. Steve and I bounced email back and forth last weekend about the relationship between weblogs and community (blogs as opposed to listservs), and I'm still thinking through whether weblogs (even collaborative ones) do much to promote community. I do think that there is a certain kind of community involved in collablogging, but I wonder if the more successful ones ultimately end up reflecting community more than they produce it. Hmm. Don't know.
Fortunately, Clay Shirky has already thought about this in more detail than I feel capable of tonight. He writes:
If you want to host a community online, don't kid yourself into believing that giving reporters weblogs and calling the reader comments "community" is the same as the real thing. Weblogs operate on a spectrum from media outlet (e.g. InstaPundit) to communal conversation (e.g. LiveJournal), but most weblogs are much more broadcast than intercast. Likewise, most comments are write-only replies to the original post in the manner of Letters to the Editor, rather than real conversations among the users. This doesn't mean that broadcast weblogs or user comments are bad; they just don't add up to a community.
Now, this is in the context of "businesses trying to harness the power of online communities for commercial ends," but he gets at some of what I'm feeling here. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm not trying to mount some sort of critique against C&C, or any academic blog (more = merrier, imo). I am wondering, I suppose, if weblogs aren't just becoming the latest academic thing, the way that e-journals (and websites for print journals) were about 5 years ago. I wonder if, a couple of years from now, our Google searches will be cluttered to death with litterblogs, as these experiments pop up and fade away.
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